


Tell the truth

by dunklenacht310



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Bipolar Disorder, Blood, Bottom Harry, Gay Sex, Graphic Description, Horror, Insomnia, M/M, Medication, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Mystery, Schizophrenia, Sleepwalking, Slow Build, Thriller, Top Zayn, niall and liam are not very present but they're very important, there is a description of animals being killed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-18 16:37:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18123797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dunklenacht310/pseuds/dunklenacht310
Summary: It was so crazy how sane Harry looked, how that was probably the first real conversation they were having, and yet Harry still had to be locked in that room. “I don’t wanna leave you here” Zayn confessed honestly, because all there had been between them before that day had been lies, and Zayn was tired of them, and Harry was probably even more tired.-Zayn is hired as a psychiatrist in a private mental institution. Harry Styles is his most difficult patient. Until Harry starts telling Zayn some very upsetting things, and suddenly the hospital doesn't look like that good of a place anymore.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: The plot of this story revolves around mental illnesses. Reader discretion is advised. If you think you might be sensitive about the themes listed in the tags, please please please do not read this story.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't know or own any of the characters. I only own the plot and the original characters.

 

 

 

Zayn drank his coffee that morning while sitting at the breakfast bar in his kitchen, barely managing to restrain himself from rolling his eyes.

Trisha was there, because of course she wouldn’t pass the occasion of making him breakfast in his own kitchen to see him off for his first day of work and to direct her pitiful puppy eyes at him one more time.

She was busying herself with the breakfast, and sniffling at him every time they made eye contact, as if Zayn was about to leave for war.

“Ma, will you stop sniffling?” he said as gently as he could “I’m not going to war. I am just starting my new job”

Trisha sniffled more loudly. “At an asylum, Zayn. Really, I don’t think there’s even a difference between a place like that and a war zone”

Zayn rolled his eyes freely at that. “Psychiatric hospital, ma. Not asylum. Asylum hasn’t been a word for decades”

“Still” Trisha murmured “I don’t know why you would apply for a job in a place like that, sunshine, I really don’t”

“Because” he stated, standing up and reaching for her shoulders so he could start massaging them and try to comfort her a bit “It’s the only way I can do my job and use my license until I have the actual money to buy myself a real studio”

“If I knew you would end up as a psychiatrist in an asylum, I would have never let you choose psych as a major in college”

Zayn smiled and kissed his mother on her forehead. “Psychiatric hospital, ma. Asylums are not a thing” he amended again “Now I gotta go, don’t wanna be late. I’ll call you tonight”

Trisha hit him in the shoulder, hard. “You call me _during your lunch break_ , and you’ll _see_ me tonight, ‘cause you’re coming to _my_ place after you get out of there so I can be sure you’re okay”

Zayn chuckled and kissed her on her forehead again, grabbing a croissant and putting it between his teeth while he wore his jacket. “I’m gonna be fine, ma, this is what I wanna do with my life” he said around the pastry in his mouth.

Trisha sighed. “How did you sleep last night?” she asked, with a stubborn tilt to her voice.

Zayn grabbed his backpack and removed the croissant from his teeth. “Peachy” he lied, and he knew his mother knew.

“How can you help those people there if you don’t even sleep properly?” she commented, crossing her arms on her chest.

“I am clinically not an insomniac, mum” he said sternly “My sleep schedule is still a bit fucked, yes, but I am _fine_. I wouldn’t have gotten my license if I wasn’t fine, would I?”

Trisha reluctantly nodded. “Okay, okay. I know you know what you’re doing. I’m just afraid this job will mess with your head and all the work you did will be for nothing. I just worry, sunshine”

“Don’t” Zayn said, forcing out a sincere smile and kissing her again on her forehead “I’ll see you tonight then. Make me chicken biryani?” he grinned.

Trisha scoffed and shoved at him. “Okay. Now go. I’m tired of looking at your beautiful face”

“Love you!” Zayn screamed from the corridor, and out he went.

 

*

 

Zayn parked his car in the parking lot of the hospital, and prayed all the divinities above that Trisha Malik never decided to look up Zayn’s workplace, because everything in the exteriors of St. Thomas Psychiatric Clinic screamed _Asylum_.

Zayn took a deep breath as he got out of the car with his backpack, trying to ignore the gloomy grey of the 30s building, the scrutinizing eyes he could see behind the white-framed windows, and the creepy air around the whole construction.

A tall man with grey hair trimmed in a military-looking cut was waiting for him on the stairs, under the entrance porch. “Doctor Malik” he smiled, reaching out a hand for Zayn “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you in person”

Zayn shook his hand. “Mr. Barlow, I presume? Nice to meet you”

Barlow nodded, and gestured for Zayn to come inside the hospital. Zayn was immediately hit with the brightness of the lights reverberating on the immaculate white walls, and his first thought was that lights so bright were not the best idea when dealing with mentally ill people. He didn’t say it though.

Barlow, who was the director of the private psychiatric clinic, didn’t waste any time in pleasantries and started showing Zayn around. The juvenile ward, the open units where the less critical patients spent their time, the eating disorders ward, and on the other side of the whole building, they reached the long-term crisis stabilization unit, which was in other words the ward where they kept the people with illnesses that would never heal. The condemned, the forever mad, the psychotic people that didn’t have a chance of ever getting out of that hospital. That particular ward was the reason Zayn had sent his CV to St. Thomas. It was Zayn’s specialization field, the treating of patients that would never heal, because he firmly believed they should never be given up on. If he could make their life a bit easier despite their illnesses, then Zayn would, because he’d been in a similar ward once, with no hope of getting better, and someone had helped him, and against all odds, he’d healed.

He briefly thought the long-term crisis stabilization ward looked like a prison wing. “And that is our LTCS ward” Barlow said unsurprisingly “Your office is right here, in the junction between LCTS and Eating Disorders”

Wonderful. “Thank you very much for the tour, Mr. Barlow”

Barlow smiled and opened the door to Zayn’s office with a key, which he then gave to Zayn. “No worries, doctor Malik. I perfectly understand this structure can be a bit complicated, because the building was born in the 30s and sadly when I bought it and we decided to renew it, we were told the foundations were too old, so we had to keep the original shape if we didn’t want the whole thing to collapse”

_Cool. So the building has to keep looking like an asylum forever._ “I understand. I luckily have a very good sense of direction”

Barlow chuckled. “Very good, very good. Then I’ll leave you to your new office, and once you’re all settled, you can start your shift with the juvenile ward patients”

Zayn frowned. He was a psychiatrist for the whole clinic, which admittedly was not very big, but still, he didn’t understand why Barlow wanted him to start with the kids. “I was actually thinking I’d start with the LTCS wards, if you don’t mind” he carefully said “They are the most difficult cases after all, so I usually like to deal with them when my mind is fresh”

Barlow smiled in an exaggerated way that looked completely and totally fake. “As you wish, doctor Malik. You are the new psychiatrist after all, you can choose how to do your job. You will find all the patients’ folders on your desk, and an electronic copy of them in your office’s computer. We only have three patients in LTCS at the moment, but I should warn you. They are a lot to handle” he said, nodding gravely.

Zayn went inside his office and dropped his backpack on his desk, smiling at Barlow who stayed on the threshold. “Don’t worry, Mr. Barlow. I do know how to do my job indeed” he said.

Barlow smiled and retreated. “I will see you for lunch break, then, doctor Malik” he stated, and left Zayn alone with the relatively tall pile of patient folders.

He extricated the three LTCS patients from the rest, and sat down at his desk to have a look at them first thing.

The psychiatrist who had worked in the structure before Zayn, a certain Ben Winston the folders said, had come to a conclusion about all three patients, and the diagnosis was neatly written at the end of each folder. The name of the psychiatrist jutted something in Zayn’s memory, but he couldn’t place it; he shrugged a little to himself and went over the files, but he promised to himself that he was going to start fresh with the patients, so that he could give his own diagnosis. He knew how dangerous it was to only rely on some other doctor’s work, because you never knew how _good_ that doctor was, if the diagnosis had been sloppy for some reason, if they had simply been wrong. And Zayn couldn’t afford that, because he _knew_ how someone could unnecessarily suffer because of a wrong diagnosis.

Ben Winston had stated, on the last page of the three folders:

_Niall James Horan, 29. Diagnosis: schizophrenia, kept under control with the medication reported in the folder._

_Liam James Payne, 29. Diagnosis: bipolar disorder with extremely violent outbursts, kept under control with the medication reported in the folder._

_Harry Edward Styles, 28. Diagnosis: pathological liar. Heavy medication needed._

 

*

 

Zayn heaved a sigh and decided not to wear his white coat, because he knew it made him look different and unapproachable to the patients, and he didn’t want that, especially not with _him_.

He had decided Harry Styles was going to be his first patient, because he’d never worked with a pathological liar, not in his whole internship, or training, not even during the mandatory year he’d had to spend shadowing a licensed psychiatrist.

So he made his way to Harry’s room, finding out the door was made of steel, with a small peeping hole which was now closed as well. _Pathological liars aren’t usually violent, his folder doesn’t indicate that he is, why did they even put him in a steel room in the LTCS ward?_

He knocked and opened the door.

Harry Styles was on him in an instant, not hurting him, but grabbing his hands and staring at Zayn with huge green eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.

Zayn gently removed Harry from himself and smiled. “I’m your new doctor, Harry. My name’s Zayn”

“You have to help me, Zayn” Harry said, shaking “They’re keeping me here, they’re confusing me with meds, but I’m not crazy, I’m not a liar. I found out something they didn’t want me to, and then they locked me up here. I used to work here. All three of us did. I was a psychiatrist”


	2. Lies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “No, Harry, I cannot go out with you, because you’re my patient” Zayn slowly replied.   
> Harry, unlike Liam and Niall, was very conscious about his situation, about the fact that he was interned in an hospital, and most of the time he didn’t even seem to have a problem with it, and he just kept smiling in that obnoxiously cute way at Zayn, while he also kept spinning his lies like he honestly thought Zayn wouldn’t notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: The plot of this story revolves around mental illnesses. Reader discretion is advised. If you think you might be sensitive about the themes listed in the tags, please please please do not read this story.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't know or own any of the characters. I only own the plot and the original characters.

 

 

 

Zayn called his mother during lunch break, although he hadn’t really promised he would. He didn’t really want to admit it, but he kind of needed to hear his mum’s voice after the morning he’d spent in the LTCS ward talking to the three lads there, and then in the open unit with his youngest patient, an eighteen-year-old kid named Elliot who hadn’t spoken a single word to Zayn for the entirety of their session.

“Sunshine?” his mum answered the call.

“Hey, ma” he sighed “It’s lunch break”

“Are you okay, baby?” Trisha sighed too.

He nodded before remembering his mother couldn’t see him. “Yeah. It’s… harder than I originally thought. But I like it here. The director’s a bit weird to be honest, but the patients are cool”

“Mentally ill people are not _cool_ , Zayn” Trisha replied indignantly.

He chuckled. “I know, I know. I just meant it’s cool that I get to work with them. And help them, hopefully”

“Your big heart will be the death of you eventually” his mother commented, but there was no real heat behind her words “What do… what do they have?”

“You know I can’t talk about the patients, ma” Zayn scolded her, but he also knew he would eventually cave in and tell her, no names and no details, but he would.

Trisha laughed. “My ethical baby” she cooed, and Zayn rolled his eyes.

He’d taken food from the employee cafeteria on the first floor of the hospital, but the sun had been shining so bright he hadn’t found it in his heart to eat inside, so he’d brought his bowl with mushroom soup outside, and was now sitting on a bench in the hospital’s front yard.

“There’s this one patient” he caved in at last “He’s got these big green eyes. He’s so young, ma. Couple years younger than me”

Trisha hummed. “What’s his problem?”

“He lies, apparently” Zayn said “Pathologically. I mean, that’s what last psychiatrist’s diagnosis says. It’s a bit weird they put him in the long-term crisis stabilization ward though. He’s been here for just a few months, I dunno, it feels weird that they already know he’s not gonna heal, you know”

“Zayn” Trisha said sternly “Please don’t get too involved. There has to be a reason they put him there, right?”

“Yeah” Zayn conceded “It’s not in his folder though. And he didn’t seem that out of it to me, to be honest. I mean yeah, he was talking a bit of nonsense about him formerly working here at the beginning, but then he stopped, and he was just, like, there, answering my questions and asking me questions about myself in return. I didn’t tell him anything of course” he quickly added before Trisha could lose her shit “But, I don’t know, he seemed more interested in getting to know me rather than talking about himself. Pathological liars always talk about themselves, it’s weird. He even said it looked like a date, if you didn’t consider us being in a steel room. Made me laugh” he continued honestly.

Trisha sighed. “You’ll figure it out, sunshine. If he’s not beyond help, you’ll notice eventually”

“Yeah. I gotta go now, ma. See you tonight, yeah? I can already smell your chicken biryani”

Trisha laughed. “Yeah, baby. I love you”

“Love you too, ma” he replied, and hung up.

“Already divulging hospital secrets, doc?” someone’s voice right next to him made Zayn jolt.

He looked sideways, and realized a guy was sitting next to him on the bench, a lit cigarette between his lips. He smirked at Zayn when he noticed how he’d startled him.

Zayn had seen the guy a couple of times in the course of that morning, roaming around the rooms in his nurse uniform, pushing trays of food and medicines around.

“I’m, like, it was my mother, I didn’t tell her anything important, it’s just…” Zayn explained.

The guy’s blue eyes crinkled when he laughed. “It’s fine, Mr. Shrink. I was joking, my own sisters know every single thing about our patients and I don’t think anyone’s gonna die ‘cause of it”

Zayn closed his mouth and lighted a cigarette himself. “My name’s not Mr. Shrink, Mr. Nurse” he offered.

“My name’s not Mr. Nurse either” the nurse replied, shoving a hand Zayn’s way “I’m Louis Tomlinson. I’m in charge of making them eat their veggies and I check under their tongues to make sure they swallow their happy pills” he stated.

Zayn snorted a laugh. “I’m Zayn. Zayn Malik. I make sure they will eventually be happy without the pills”

“Well played, doc, well played” Louis conceded, taking another drag from his cigarette “So, were you talking to your mum about Haz?”

“Haz?” Zayn frowned, blowing out some smoke.

Louis nodded. “Harry. Harry Styles. I call him Haz”

“You shouldn’t give ‘em nicknames, Louis” Zayn said patiently “As much as you can care for him, he cannot be your friend”

“Oh, doc, but he _is_ my friend. Haz used to work here”

Zayn felt his stomach churn unpleasantly. “What?”

Louis nodded. “He was a psychiatrist here. All three of them worked here, those shitheads. Niall and Liam were nurses, same as me. We’ve known each other for years, the four of us”

“Are you joking? It’s not funny if you are” Zayn said coldly.

“I’m not. Didn’t Harry tell you? He does nothing but say it, these days”

Harry had indeed told Zayn, the very second Zayn had stepped into his room. “He did tell me. He’s a pathological liar, Louis. I didn’t think it was true”

Louis shrugged, something sad lingering in his gaze as he stood up, stubbing out his cigarette with the tip of his crocs. “It is. Harry does say a lot of impossible shit now that his brain is fucked up, but that bit is true. They worked here, and now they’re patients in LTCS”

“Why haven’t I been informed? Why is this not registered in their folders?” Zayn demanded, standing up too and throwing away his own cigarette “I’m fairly sure someone should have told me!”

Louis chuckled. “Sorry, new doc, but this is not something the hospital’s very fond of sharing. You can’t think Barlow would just shake your hand and be like ‘by the way, the three patients in LTCS used to work here, then something happened to them and they got fucked in the head so bad we had to intern them all’. It doesn’t matter. I guess he thought you didn’t need that info to deal with them”

“What happened?” Zayn asked, eager to know. How could _anyone_ think that Zayn didn’t _need_ that particular info?

Louis smiled sadly and shook his head. “No can do, babe. We don’t talk about it, and you shouldn’t either. I’m just telling you out of the extreme kindness of my big heart. And don’t even try to ask any of them. Niall and Liam don’t even remember, and even in the unlikely hypothesis Harry does, last time someone tried to ask him he threw a fit so violent we had to tie him in a straitjacket, and that fucked him in the head even worse” he said “And I will fucking end you if you fuck up Harry more than he already is”

Zayn held Louis’s hard gaze for a moment, but in the end he caved in with a sigh and nodded. “Of course I won’t ask Harry, Louis. Even if he could tell me, I would never know if what he says is true or not”

Louis nodded. “I feel your struggle. Imagine how bad it is for his best friend” he replied, pointing at himself with his thumb “Let’s go back to work, doc. We can find a more pleasant subject of conversation next time, yeah? And when I’ll be done deliberating if you’re good or bad, you can invite me for dinner at your mum’s, and maybe I’ll tell you what happened over her chicken biryani”

Zayn chuckled despite his stomach still feeling upside-down, and nodded, following Louis back inside.

“Zayn?” Louis called him before they parted ways.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t even think of asking Barlow” Louis advised him “He really doesn’t like it when someone brings that shit up. He fired a nurse after she asked last month”

 

*

 

“Do you wanna go out with me?”

Harry was sitting cross-legged on his bed, smiling in a way that made his dimples dig deep in his cheeks, and Zayn sighed, rolling his eyes.

Zayn had been working at St. Thomas for three weeks already, and he was now sure Harry was hands-down his most difficult patient.

He knew it was unprofessional of him to even _think_ about Harry’s question, but he could admit at least with himself that he wished things were different so he could say yes.

It wasn’t just because Harry was extremely hot. Zayn could deal with people being all gorgeous and green-eyed and curly at him, but what nagged at him and made him lose his already shabby sleep every night was that Harry was just _good_. When he’d first read over his files, Zayn had expected Harry to be a manipulative piece of shit, for lack of a better medical terminology. But over the course of those three weeks, Zayn had found out Harry was a kind, peaceful individual. An individual who sometimes made up things and said them to Zayn like they were his biggest secrets, with a certainty that would have fooled Zayn if he was any less good at his job.

“No, Harry, I cannot go out with you, because you’re my patient” he slowly replied.

Harry, unlike Liam and Niall, was very conscious about his situation, about the fact that he was interned in an hospital, and most of the time he didn’t even seem to have a problem with it, and he just kept smiling in that obnoxiously cute way at Zayn, while he also kept spinning his lies like he honestly thought Zayn wouldn’t notice.

Harry pouted. “But you’re so _fit_ , Zayn. And I know you think I’m fit too. I can see it in your eyes”

Zayn arched an eyebrow, drumming his fingers on the notepad that stayed unused in most of his sessions with Harry. “Why do you think so?” he asked.

Harry shrugged. “You’re forgetting I was a psychiatrist. I know what it looks like, when people try to hide things from me” he answered “Your eyes tell me stuff”

Zayn decided to humour him, because when Harry was in one of _those_ moods, humouring him was the best way to make him say anything even remotely close to the truth. “What do they tell you?”

Harry giggled, and started counting on his fingers. “You think I’m fit. You wish things would be different so that we could go out at last. You think there’s something wrong with my brain but you’re not actually _that_ sure ‘cause the diagnosis was made by someone else, and you don’t trust other people that much, especially not doctors. And, last but not least, you thought about me when you wanked last night”

Zayn schooled his features into nothing at all, because he couldn’t let Harry _see_ that he was right about each and every single one of the things he’d listed. He hoped his stubble masked whatever colour his cheeks had just gained at Harry’s last statement, which was also completely and utterly true. Harry looked so _sane_ , sometimes, it made Zayn feel like he was the crazy one. How could someone be so present, so lucid, and also have an uncurable mental disease?

“I see” he just said, because Harry was the king of lies, and by consequence, he just _noticed_ whenever people lied to him “But as I said, Harry, I’m very sorry, but I can’t go out with you. Besides, it’s not like you’re even _allowed_ to go out”

And well, maybe the teasing and the shoving in Harry’s face that he was interned was not professional either, but Zayn didn’t worry about that, because after almost a month, he _knew_ Harry, knew where his limits were, and he was always careful not to push too much at them, but to get closer and closer to them every time anyway, so that Harry would react and give Zayn access to whatever truth was still left in his mind.

Harry pouted some more, shifting his crossed legs, and Zayn resolutely didn’t look at them. The thin sweats and t-shirts the hospital gave the patients might be safe for patients’ health, because they couldn’t use the clothes to hurt or kill themselves, but they weren’t safe at all for _Zayn’s_ health, not when Harry’s thighs looked so thick and perfect in them and _Jesus Christ Zayn he’s a fucking patient and he lies to everyone._

“What did you do last night?” Harry asked him after a moment, his eyes gone a bit distant.

_Apart from wanking about you, you mean?_ “I hung out with my little sister” Zayn replied honestly.

“I have a sister too. Her name’s Safaa” Harry answered.

Zayn sighed and scribbled the words _my sister_ on his notepad. “Harry, you do know I remember I told you about my sister Safaa, right? You can’t lie to me about my own sister”

Harry shrugged. “She’s my sister” he just said “I think she’d like it, if we went out together”

Zayn smiled. “You think Gemma would like it?” he asked.

Harry didn’t even flinch, and just smiled back. “Yeah, Gemma would like it a lot” he said.

Zayn fidgeted with the corner of his notepad to channel his frustration and hide it from Harry. _Do you even know the difference between when you lie and when you tell the truth, Harry? Do you remember you life outside of here? Do you lie on purpose or not?_

“Zayn? Did I say something wrong? I’m sorry” Harry amended quickly, and when Zayn looked back at him, he found worried green eyes staring at him.

“Why do you think you said something wrong, Harry?” he asked.

“I dunno. You look sad. I never want to make you sad, you’re my only friend”

_Are you lying right now? Do you remember your_ real _friends?_

Maybe Harry really knew how to read things in Zayn’s eyes, because the next question he asked sounded like a reply to Zayn’s last thought. “How are Niall and Liam holding up?”

“Who are Niall and Liam?” Zayn asked, feeling close to something like victory. Harry had never mentioned Niall and Liam in any of their sessions.

“Niall’s my brother” Harry said surely “Liam’s his husband”

_False and false, babe_ , Zayn thought, and then immediately scolded himself for thinking about Harry with the pet name Zayn gave to his closest people. _Harry, not babe. Harry Edward Styles, 28, pathological liar and nothing more._

Zayn nodded. “Where are they?” he asked Harry.

“Right here, in rooms 34 and 35, right next to me” Harry replied “They put us here. Together and never able to see each other again. They’re the ones who lie, Zayn, don’t you get it?” Harry grunted, frustration clearly visible in his eyes as he wrung his long fingers and fidgeted at the base of them, as if he was wearing rings “They made us go crazy and they locked us up”

Zayn sighed and tried to collect his thoughts. He had witnessed Harry’s sudden outbursts about being locked up against his will more than once, and it was never pleasant to watch. “Who is _they_ , Haz?” he asked, and then he cursed himself for having slipped so bad.

“Haz?” Harry asked, widening his eyes “Why did you call me Haz? I’m not Haz, I’m not Haz, I’m not Haz, my name’s not Haz, my name is Harry, Harry Edward Styles, twenty-eight, I’m a psychiatrist, I need to talk to Christine, where’s she, I need her to be here, Zayn Zayn Zayn Za…”

“Harry” Zayn almost shouted, frantically noting down the name ‘Christine’, because it was the first time Harry mentioned it.

Harry immediately stopped his river of words, and snapped his mouth shut so hard his teeth clacked. He stayed there, slightly panting for a moment, before looking at Zayn with a frown. “Did I say something wrong, Zayn?” he asked.

Zayn sighed. “No, Harry. You’re fine”

“I don’t think I am fine” Harry muttered, fidgeting again with his non-existent rings.

Zayn opened his mouth to reply, but he didn’t, because a knock on the door made Harry jump, and the next moment Louis made his way in the room, pushing a cart of medicines in front of him. “Hello, doc. Hi, Haz, how you doing?”

Harry smiled at Louis, not a care in the world for the fact Louis had called him Haz, and he didn’t have a breakdown about it like he’d done with Zayn. “I was telling Zayn about that time we climbed a mountain” he lied.

Louis arched an eyebrow. “We never did, Haz. We tried to climb it and got tired before even getting to the base of it”

Harry blinked. “You’re lying” he said, betrayal in his eyes.

Louis sighed. “No, Haz, you are” he said patiently, but Zayn clearly noticed how sad his eyes were.

Harry didn’t answer, but he lowered his gaze to his fingers, where he’d left red marks for how long he’d been fidgeting with them.

“Stop that, Haz, you can see your rings are not there” Louis said in a sad mutter “I have your meds here, be good and take them, yeah?”

Harry started to frantically shake his head. “No, Lou, please please don’t make me, I don’t need any meds, they confuse me and then I start lying ‘cause I can’t help it, why are you doing this to me?”

Zayn straightened his back, because it was the very first time Harry had explicitly admitted he lied.

“It’s one of _those_ days, eh, Hazza?” Louis murmured, busying himself with the small cup where the two white pills Harry had to take daily sat.

And well, that was another problem Zayn had. He knew Harry needed the meds, because his pathological lying evolved into an actual detachment from reality without them; but the meds, as well as the diagnosis, had been some other doctor’s doing, and that fact nagged at Zayn.

He also knew there was no other way to keep Harry even remotely sane and quiet, though, so Zayn had had to suck it up and keep prescribing Harry the meds.

“C’mon, Haz, take ‘em” Louis said, handing the small cup to Harry.

Harry took it with shaking hands, and stared at Louis with tears in his eyes. “I thought you were my best friend, Lou. But you aren’t” he said, and swallowed the pills.

Louis winced at Harry’s words, but just for a moment, just while Harry closed his eyes and gulped down the pills with some water. By the time Harry had his eyes open again, Louis’s face was unreadable. “Tongue” he just told Harry.

Harry obediently opened his mouth, lifting up his tongue so Louis could check under it and be sure the meds had gone down Harry’s throat. “Good lad” Louis said “I am your friend, Haz, I am your best friend until the day I fucking die. And that’s exactly why I’m doing this to you”

Zayn wasn’t really sure it was a good call to tell Harry that, but Harry just smiled at Louis. “You’re not my best friend” he retorted “I don’t have any friends”

“That’s a lie, Haz” Louis sighed, starting to back off and pulling the medicine cart with him.

Zayn nodded at Louis, and Louis smiled a little bit without speaking.

“Will you go out with me, Zayn?” Harry asked again, like nothing had happened. His tone was a bit slurred, and Zayn cursed the meds again, because Harry was always useless after he took the pills, and his session wasn’t over. And maybe a small, tiny part of Zayn just wished he could talk to him a bit longer.

Zayn didn’t reply, but Harry didn’t seem to really mind, because he just laid down and was asleep in a matter of minutes.

Zayn sighed and gently tucked him under the covers, because he could at least give him that, if he wasn’t able to do anything else for him. Only when he retrieved his notepad and turned to leave the room he realized Louis was still there, holding the medicine cart in the doorway and staring at Zayn with something unreadable in his gaze. “You could tell him yes, you know” Louis offered.

Zayn arched his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

Louis chuckled. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Zayn, I didn’t mean going out with him, I’m not blind, deaf and stupid” he amended “I mean you could tell him yes, and I dunno, have your sessions outside in the yard. He used to love it out there, where the benches in the grass are. You have the power to let him go out of this room, you could fucking use it sooner or later”

“Do you really think it’s a good idea to let him have his way?”

Louis shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if you talk to him here or outside, Zayn. He’s still gonna lie. But Harry is the kind of person who wilts away if he doesn’t see the sun every once in a while. It can’t hurt him more than everything already did”

Zayn nodded. “I’ll think about it” he conceded “Louis?” he called out when they were in the corridor.

“Yeah, doc?”

“Who’s Christine?”

Something akin to worry flashed on Louis’s face, but after a second he answered. “She was one of Harry’s patients. His favourite, although he would never admit to having one. She died” he chuckled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes “Haz must be properly wooing you or summat. I don’t think he ever spoke to anyone about her, except me”

“How did she die?”

“She was fucked in the head. That’s how she died” Louis just replied “I’ll see you around, Zayn” he added, and turned the medicine cart around to proceed to the next room.

Zayn heard Liam happily scream Louis’s name when Louis knocked and opened the door.

Louis laughed. “You’re in a happy mood today, ain’t you, Leeyum?”

“Louis, I’m always happy when I see you” Liam laughed.

In that moment, Zayn felt so sorry for Louis that his heart broke.

 

*

 

Zayn knew that one of the worst downsides of not sleeping properly was that his thoughts got stuck in his head when he started to get tired.

He got out of the eating disorders ward with his shoulders in knots, and the thought was nagging more and more at his brain.

_Christine. Christine. Christine._

He didn’t even know why the name Harry had mentioned was the thing that stood out the most from the mess of rambles Harry had thrown at Zayn in their session that morning, but one thing was for sure. Harry had never spoken about any of his own patients before. Granted, he could repeat that he’d been a psychiatrist in the clinic even ten times in a row on a bad day, but never in those three weeks had he talked about his former patients.

So when Zayn got back to his office and plopped on the uncomfortable chair with a sigh, he turned on the computer and pulled the hospital’s patient register open.

He looked for any patients named Christine. The engine came up with five results, but when he scrolled through the files, he came to understand all of them had been hospitalized at St. Thomas and had eventually healed, therefore they were not the person Zayn was looking for.

He ran another search pairing the name Christine with Harry Styles. He was hit with zero results.

Zayn frowned. If Christine had been Harry’s patient, then the system should have her data in it. But the search page was frustratingly blank, the message ‘no matches found’ unnervingly staring at Zayn.

A knock on his door made him raise his eyes from the screen. “Come in” he said.

The door opened to reveal Louis, wearing his street clothes which made him look weird to Zayn, because he’d never seen Louis in other than his nurse uniform. “It’s nine in the evening, Zayn” Louis said with a sigh, crossing his arms on his chest and leaning into the doorframe “You should have gone home an hour ago”

Zayn smiled a little at Louis’s evident concern. “I was trying to look something up”

“Is this about Haz and Christine?”

Zayn stared at Louis. “Why do you think it is?”

Louis rolled his eyes and stepped inside the office, closing the door. “Don’t you ‘why do you think it is’ me, doc, I’m not one of your patients” he retorted “Whatever you found about Christine, Haz had no fault”

Zayn frowned. “I didn’t find anything, Louis. I have zero results for the search”

Louis sighed again and sat down on the chair on the other side of Zayn’s desk. “Did you spell her name right? It’s Christine with a Ch”

Zayn nodded. “I did. Do you… can you tell me her surname?”

“Why are you obsessing with her?”

“I’m not obsessing. Harry never mentioned any of his former patients before. I think the fact he mentioned her can mean something. I need elements I can challenge Harry with, Louis. Not challenge him in a bad way, but in a psychiatric way” he amended when he saw anger flash in Louis’s eyes “If I don’t get to the bottom of the problem, I can’t help him. You do want me to make Harry heal, don’t you?”

“Are you actually saying you think he can be healed, Zayn?” Louis asked coldly.

Zayn shrugged. “I can’t say for sure. But to me, Harry doesn’t look like an LTCS patient. Does he look that to you?”

“No. I never understood why Ben put him there. All three of them, really. I mean, I’ve seen other LTCS patients, and they were far worse off than Haz, Niall and Liam, to be honest” Louis murmured slowly, lowering his gaze to the table “But maybe it’s just my wishful thinking, because if I think they can still be healed, it means I won’t spend the rest of my life with my three best friends locked in an asylum”

Zayn didn’t tell Louis that he wholeheartedly agreed with him. He could admit with himself that he’d also thought long and hard about their situation, though, and he’d come to the conclusion their brains were indeed pretty fucked, but he couldn’t be hundred per cent sure they were beyond help. Hell, he wasn’t even sure they’d been _diagnosed_ right. “The line between wishful thinking and still having a little bit of hope left is very thin, Louis” was what Zayn said “I won’t tell you to give up, not yet. And I’ll do all I can to help them. But I need _something_ ”

“Maersk” Louis said.

“What?”

“Christine Maersk. That was her name. She was half Danish. Harry lost his shit whenever she taught him a new swear word in Danish. They laughed so fucking hard you couldn’t tell who was the crazy one”

Louis spelled the surname letter-by-letter for Zayn, and Zayn nodded, running the new search.

He was still hit with zero results. “Louis, she’s not in here” he said worriedly.

Louis frowned. “What are you talking about, it’s been less than six months” he muttered, and stood up to circle the desk and lean into the screen next to Zayn “What the fuck?” he added when he saw the blank page.

Zayn sighed. “Why wouldn’t she be listed?”

“I dunno” Louis said “Look for Harry. Just Harry”

Zayn obeyed. The result was just one, the folder with the documentation about Harry as a patient.

“What the fuck?” Louis hissed again “Where are all the folders with Harry _as a doctor_?”

Louis was right, Zayn thought. It was true Harry was a patient now, but the folders of all the patients he’d treated should still have been in the system.

“He’s worked here for four years, Zayn, we should have _hundreds_ of results for his name”

Zayn nodded. “Do you remember any of his patients?”

“Kyle Parker” Louis said “Look for Kyle”

Zayn did. The result popped up, and Zayn opened the file, quickly reading it over.

_Kyle Parker, 48._

_Diagnosis: split personality disorder._

_Followed and treated by: doc. Benjamin Winston._

“ _What_?” Louis exclaimed in a hiss “What the actual fuck? Ben wasn’t even _here_ when Harry was treating Kyle!”

“Louis, you gotta calm the fuck down” Zayn said in a whisper, feeling cold sweat running down his spine. Ben Winston’s name still looked familiar to Zayn, but no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn’t remember where he’d already seen it.

“How can I calm the fuck down? They _erased_ Harry as a doctor from the system!”

Zayn nodded. “I know. I know, but until we figure out what this all means, we can’t have anyone hear us, do you understand?”

Zayn knew he was right. There was something profoundly wrong with the fact someone had decided to delete Harry’s work from the system, but they needed more proof, they needed a _reason_ before Louis could start raising hell as he clearly and understandably wanted to.

“Give me other names. Of Harry’s patients” Zayn said quietly.

Louis gave him at least ten more names, and the results were always the same. All the patients were there, their diagnosis was the one Harry had given and treated, but the system stated it had been Ben Winston’s doing.

Louis was utterly shocked as he collapsed on a chair next to Zayn, but Zayn tried to keep his cool for both of them, because that was unethical, illegal, wrong on so many levels, no matter how mentally ill Harry was now. Just to have ulterior proof, Zayn looked for the list of all the psychiatrists who had been working at the hospital, and scrolled down to the end of it, looking at the last names.

_Peter Stephenson._

_Benjamin Winston._

_Zayn Javadd Malik._

“They really erased him” Zayn murmured, looking between Stephenson’s name and Winston’s, where Harry’s name should have been “They erased him and they wrote off all his patients as Winston’s”

“Look for Niall and Liam. Look in the other employees list, Zayn” Louis urged him, and Zayn obeyed. It took barely two minutes to realize Liam and Niall had also been deleted from the list where they should have been registered.

“They erased them all” Louis’s hands were shaking when he spoke “Why did they delete Christine as well? Christine’s not there at all. Why? She was Harry’s last patient. She died. This must mean something” he reasoned, almost like he was speaking to himself and not to Zayn.

Zayn opened his mouth, but closed it when he saw the shadow of someone through the opaque glass of his door as the person went down the corridor.

“This is not the place to talk, you said it on my first day” Zayn whispered “Why don’t you come over for dinner? I guess I can fairly state you deliberated on me at last, and I’m good?”

Louis, despite still being very upset, chuckled. “Your mum gonna make me chicken biryani?”

“I think for now it’s better if my mother doesn’t know there’s something wrong with my workplace and my patients and probably my boss” Zayn stated grimly “But don’t you worry, my friend. I make a mean chicken biryani myself”

 

*

 

“Christine came to St. Thomas of her own free will” Louis said when their plates were empty, and they just had two cans of beer in front of them.

Zayn hadn’t pressed Louis for answers during their dinner, although he would have very much liked to skip the food entirely and just _know_. He understood how upset Louis was at their recent discovery, and upset people were never the most objective storytellers. So he’d waited, but now that Louis was talking, he sighed in relief.

“She had nightmares. Bad ones, the ones that make you scream in your sleep. So her brain resorted to not sleeping at all, and by the time she dragged herself to the front door of the clinic asking for help, she was hallucinating”

Zayn shivered, feeling Christine’s condition hit something dark and ugly deep in his brain, where the memories of _his own_ condition lingered.

“Harry diagnosed her with chronic insomnia” Louis continued predictably “She was sixteen and alone, her family dismissed her as batshit crazy and left her to herself. When she had a good day, she smiled at Harry and told him he was her only friend. Which was the complete and utter truth”

“How long was she in the hospital?” Zayn asked.

“Less than a year. Harry was good at his job, Zayn, one of the most promising psychiatrists in the country, everyone said” Louis chuckled sadly “He had Christine on medication, but he actually _treated her_ , you know? Not like all the other doctors do. They just give ‘em the meds, and that’s it. Harry talked to her, wanted her to get better for real. You’re the same, Zayn. I look at you with your patients. You actually care about them, you want to make them better. You remind me of Harry in so many ways, you have no idea”

“Of course I want them to get better. That’s my job”

Louis laughed and shook his head. “No, Zayn, that’s _you_. Your job is to figure out what they have, and give ‘em meds. But you don’t stop at that, you go deeper. That’s what Harry did, and that’s why he started obsessing with her case when she didn’t get better”

Zayn frowned. If Harry was so good at his job, why didn’t Christine get better? Insomnia _can_ be cured if treated on time, and Zayn was living and breathing proof. Unless…

“Harry was doing everything he could, and he insisted his sessions with Christine were going better and better. Niall and Liam were the nurses who had most contact with Christine. They also said Christine was getting better, or at least she looked like she was whenever they saw her during their sessions” Louis kept going, rolling his can of beer in his hands “But she wasn’t. She got _worse_ ”

“How?” Zayn breathed. He could only imagine Harry, peaceful and kind and a good doctor, losing his mind over a patient he couldn’t cure.

“We never knew. But one day she wasn’t having that many nightmares anymore, and the next she was having a fuckton of them, and also hallucinating again”

“Did she stop taking her meds?” was the only thing Zayn could think of.

Louis shook his head. “No. Niall and Liam were better than me at this job. They made sure she took them, and honestly, most of the time they didn’t have to, because Christine desperately wanted to get better, so she always took her meds willingly” he answered “But the thing is, that something was very wrong with her. Harry had to diagnose her with schizophrenia at some point. He insisted she couldn’t be a schizo, there was no way her insomnia could have devolved into something like that so fucking quickly he said, and yet all the symptoms were there. He was wrecked about it. He felt like a failure. He started being weird”

“What do you mean?” Zayn asked, feeling his throat constrict. Harry had been right, there really was _no way_ chronic insomnia could turn into schizophrenia like that, so quickly, not with medication and the psychiatric treatment Christine was receiving from Harry.

“He started not eating anymore. He spent his nights going through Christine’s files, trying to find out what had happened to her right under his watch. He started not sleeping himself because of it”

Zayn sighed and closed his eyes.

“Yeah” Louis said grimly “It wasn’t a bad case of it, I think, but even I could see Harry was fucked up, and I’m not even a real doctor. He started lying right about then. It was small things at first. He lied about having eaten when he hadn’t, or about having a date when he just stayed home to stare at Christine’s file on his laptop. Then he started lying about seeing his family when he didn’t, again, because he’d rather stay home and obsess over Christine. We noticed, eventually. So Liam, Niall and I took him out one night, to talk to him, try to make him understand he would not be any help to any of his patients if he became one of them” he chuckled bitterly “He knew we were right. He didn’t even try to deny it. That was when he received the call that Christine had killed herself”

“How?” Zayn asked, because he knew she was dead, but he didn’t know how it had happened, and he _needed_ to know.

Louis took a ragged breath. “I didn’t see her body, but they did. We all went to the hospital when Harry received the call, because he was her doctor, and Niall and Liam just loved the shit out of her. All three of them ran to the LTCS ward and into Christine’s room, Harry told me to stay behind and to this day I still don’t know why. I heard them scream, though, so I understood there was something deeply wrong about her death. When they came out, they weren’t talking anymore. I saw all three of them in a state of shock, is that the term? They were mute, not reacting to my voice, none of it. Barlow showed up with Ben that night. Ben had been shadowing Harry for like a week by then. He didn’t like it, but he got his license after Harry so I guess it didn’t matter that Harry was younger than him. He said they were in no condition to be left alone, gave ‘em rooms in the open unit. They stayed there for two weeks, and no one was allowed to visit them”

“What?” Zayn hissed, his stomach turning “Louis, this is not protocol. There’s no need to shield shock-shelled patients from visits. Unless the patient’s violent”

Louis took a ragged breath when Zayn revealed that to him, and his eyes flashed in anger. “They weren’t _moving or speaking_ , Zayn. They weren’t violent. But Ben didn’t allow visits anyway” he stared at Zayn for a moment and then shook his head “I thought it was normal. I didn’t even _think_  there was something wrong with it”

Zayn calmly grabbed Louis’s hand. “You couldn’t have known, Louis” he offered.

Louis didn’t reply to Zayn’s attempt at comforting him, but he kept telling the story. “I was allowed to visit them after two weeks. I went to Harry first. He looked fine for barely two minutes before he started lying to my face about his mother’s name being Johannah and how she died of leukaemia. That’s _my_ mother’s name, and that’s how _she_ died, Zayn”

Zayn shivered, not even trying to imagine how Louis had felt in that moment. “What did you do?”

“I asked Ben what the fuck was wrong with my friend. He told me Harry had already been lying for weeks before that moment, only I hadn’t thought much of it. Then he’d gotten worse. He was right, Zayn, I didn’t _think_ ” Louis gritted out angrily, banging his fist on the table “It was the same with Liam and Niall. I found both of them fucked in the head as well. Ben and Barlow told me seeing Christine’s body had traumatised them. That my three best friends got their brains fried over Christine” he added, defeated.

“Did they tell you how she died?”

Louis nodded. “She cut herself to pieces. She somehow stole a knife from the kitchen of the employee cafeteria she shouldn’t have had access to, and she spent the whole night cutting off her fingers from her hands, her feet, then proceeded to cut off her own throat. She bled out and died before anyone even noticed the pool of blood behind her door”

Zayn felt a pang of nausea rise up. No, that was not normal, even for a person diagnosed with schizophrenia.

“You know what the worst thing is?” Louis asked after a minute of silence “That Harry _had_ found something out. He’d told me the night before Christine died, that he thought something was up with the hospital but he couldn’t tell me until he was sure. He also told me Niall and Liam had the same suspicions. But when I asked them, they didn’t know what I was talking about. So I dismissed it as Harry’s umpteenth lie” he scrubbed his eyes with his fingers “Haz was right. I’m not his best friend. I’ve been the worst fucking friend since the day Christine killed herself”

Zayn felt cold sweat on his neck and back, but he didn’t care, not in that moment, not now that everything was starting to make slightly more sense. “Louis, don’t you get it? Harry was telling the truth. He did find what was wrong with Christine, and whoever found out that he knew, they didn’t like it. So they used Christine’s death to take all three of them, they isolated them for two weeks, and they did _something_ to them. They’re not fucked in the head, Louis, not really. I don’t even agree with their diagnoses, not completely. They _got_ fucked in the head by _someone_ ”

Louis stuttered for a moment, staring at Zayn with eyes so big they reminded him of Harry.

Harry, lovely Harry who wanted to go out with him.

“Niall and Liam didn’t know what Harry was talking about”

Zayn smiled. “That’s what they told you. Louis, do you wanna know something that Liam says to me on a daily basis? I know it’s unprofessional to tell you, but I guess doctor-patient confidentiality just went to fuck itself between me, you and those three”

Louis’s lips quivered, and he nodded.

“He always tells me that he’d rather die than let something happen to you” Zayn told Louis “So my guess is that they _did_ know, but they didn’t tell you because they knew it was dangerous. All three of them were protecting you, so you would stay sane and safe”

Louis burst out crying. Right then and there, face in his hands.

“Liam’s my boyfriend” he confessed after a while “I mean, I don’t know if I can still say that he is. He and Niall don’t remember shit most of the time. But he is, and I love him. I’ve been loving him my whole life, feels like”

Zayn wasn’t surprised, because he’d spent so much time with Liam that at some point it had become fairly obvious how he loved Louis just a tiny bit _differently_ from how he loved Niall and Harry.

“We’re gonna do something” Zayn assured Louis “We’re gonna be quiet and we’re not gonna trust anyone else. But I swear if your friends aren’t just ill, and someone else is fucking with their heads, I’ll get them sane again if it’s the last thing I do”

Louis laughed through his tears. “I don’t know where you came from, doctor Malik, but I’d snog you if I wasn’t taken. Let’s save my friends, then. You can start by getting Haz out of that steel room. And maybe when he’s all healed and good, you can take him out for real”

Zayn didn’t answer, but he knew the red tint of his cheeks hadn’t gone unnoticed by Louis. “He’s my patient” he retorted “And, Louis. I have to be honest with you. We can find out what’s wrong. But it might take a long time to heal them properly”

Louis scoffed. “The line between wishful thinking and still having a little bit of hope left is very thin, doc” he stated, and Zayn couldn’t do but smile.

Their conversation shifted to lighter topics after that, and Zayn felt sorry for Louis again, because it was clear he was very alone, not having managed or wanted to make friends with anyone after he’d lost Harry, Liam and Niall.

“For what it’s worth, Zayn” Louis told him on his threshold before leaving “I think Harry really likes you. Like, genuinely. He’s always rambling about you to me when you’re not there. And I really feel like he’s not lying when he does”

Zayn just smiled and didn’t answer, because he wasn’t ready to admit even to himself how much that feeling was starting to become mutual. How he looked forward to seeing Harry no matter how hard he told himself that there was no way they could be together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is proving itself to be the most complicated thing I've ever written. I am doing my research to be as accurate as possible, but I apologize for any eventual unrealistic dynamics. I hope the story still works.  
> I love to hear what readers think, so comments are always appreciated!


	3. Dates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “And tomorrow” Harry added with another smile “We can keep pretending I’m crazy, and we can keep pretending we don’t love each other, and we can think of a way to get out of this fucking mess”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: The plot of this story revolves around mental illnesses. Reader discretion is advised. If you think you might be sensitive about the themes listed in the tags, please please please do not read this story.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't know or own any of the characters. I only own the plot and the original characters.

 

 

 

“Be still my heart” Harry chirped that morning, as Louis gently directed him to where Zayn was waiting for them.

Zayn chuckled at the dramatic way Harry was clutching at his own chest, as if his heart was really going to burst out of it any moment. “Are you feeling unwell, Harry? Maybe we should go inside?” he grinned.

Harry squealed and shook his head. “No, no, I’m good, I’m peachy! Look how peachy I am” he exclaimed, lightly pirouetting on the spot in a swirl of curls, and almost managing to fall and split his head open on the bench.

Louis snorted and steadied him. “Fucking klutz”

“Hey” Harry pouted and drawled the vocal in a way that got right to Zayn’s dick, although he managed to hold his composure “I’m sorry, it’s not every day I get to look at Doctor Zayn Freaking Malik in the sun with just a t-shirt on and tattoos out in the open for the whole world to have heart attacks over”

Zayn laughed. “I take it you’re glad we’re having our session here today?”

Harry nodded. “I am very glad. I told Louis”

Louis rolled his eyes. “He told me how wonderful and caring and fit you are ten times in a row, more like”

Harry squealed again and then giggled embarrassedly at Zayn. “Sorry. Never knew how to shut his mouth”

“True” Louis conceded, and locked eyes with Zayn.

Zayn was probably gaping a little bit, but he really couldn’t help it. He’d never seen Harry maintain his lucidity for such a long time, without telling even the smallest lie, not in the whole month Zayn had spent by his side.

Louis and Zayn had decided to do something very risky in many senses, and stop giving Harry his meds for a while without telling anyone. Zayn had been a bit reluctant with the plan at first, but he had had to agree with Louis in the end. The pills made Harry useless, and Zayn could not totally exclude they were exactly what made Harry get worse during the course of the day. Especially when Zayn had tried to find out where the hospital kept the stash of meds, and Barlow had told him he shouldn’t worry about that, that the meds were prepared by his most trusted nurses every day. That, of course, had only worried Zayn and Louis more, since some quick ‘casual’ conversations with the other nurses in the break room had revealed none of them was the one handling the rationing of pills.

Zayn had felt a bit paranoid when he realized he was suspecting the meds they were giving the patients weren’t really what he was prescribing, but once Louis had voiced the same concern, he’d decided to do something about it. The only way to be certain the meds were being manipulated was to get Harry off of them, and watch him closely. And take responsibility if it turned out they weren’t, and Harry got worse.

Zayn hadn’t slept over it for two nights, but neither he nor Louis had come up with another plan. _I could lose the license I worked so hard for over this. I could also lose my license because I might be falling for my patient. Maybe I deserve to lose my license. But how can I do nothing when I suspect my patient is a patient because someone fucked with his head? How could I live with keeping my license and letting him go?_

“Alright, Casanova” Louis told Harry “I’ll leave you with Zayn then. Have fun”

“We’ll try, but we’ll miss you too much” Harry retorted with a bright smile, and Zayn almost physically felt Louis’s pain at those words.

“You… you never replied like this to me since you became a patient” Louis said almost in a whisper.

Harry smiled and sat down on the bench, staring at Louis with his head tilted upwards. “Well, Lou, I feel more like myself today for some reason”

Louis looked at Zayn, and Zayn clearly read his eyes. _Is it ‘cause I didn’t give him the meds for two days? Is he lying? How do we know?_

“Thank you, Louis” Zayn only said, willing him to understand he had to go so that Zayn could try and force the _real_ Harry to talk.

Louis nodded and retreated.

Harry sighed, stretching his arms. “Alone at last” he winked at Zayn.

Zayn rolled his eyes. “Not really. We’re right in front of the hospital”

“We’re in the sun” Harry smiled “We’re in the sun and we’re having a date”

Zayn should have answered that it wasn’t a date, but he didn’t. He just stared at Harry’s happy smile as he enjoyed the sun on his face, his nose scrunched up and his eyes closed, and wished he could take a picture of Harry, to remember that Zayn made him happy on a sunny morning.

“What do you wanna talk about today?” Harry asked.

“Do you wanna talk about when you worked here?” Zayn asked back, in a careful tone.

Harry just leaned his back to the backrest of the bench, and nodded. “What do you want to know?”

Zayn went for a casual tone. “Anything you feel like telling me. How it made you feel. If you liked it. If any of your patients worried you”

“Do you want me to tell you about Christine?” Harry asked, his eyes much more vigilant than Zayn had ever seen them.

It had to be the meds, Zayn decided. Harry wasn’t lying, hadn’t even tried, he was present, lucid and wanting to talk. It was too much of an abrupt change, and the only difference from two days earlier was the fact Louis hadn’t given Harry the pills.

So Zayn tested his luck, and nodded. “Yeah. You can tell me about Christine if you want to”

Harry smiled. “She was very sweet and very young. She was my greatest accomplishment, until the day she got worse” he told Zayn “Have you ever seen a dismembered body, Zayn? That was what Christine tried to do to herself. That’s not how schizophrenia works, is it? You know” he rambled, his smile suddenly gone “Why isn’t Louis giving me the meds? What’s happening? Do you finally believe me?”

Zayn quietly shushed Harry, glad that no other employee of the hospital was around to listen to their conversation. “Yes, Harry, I believe you”

“I’m not crazy, Zayn. I’m not lying. I know I lie sometimes. But I can’t help it. It’s the pills. They’re bad, they’re not normal meds. Christine got worse ‘cause of the pills. It wasn’t me, I’m a good psychiatrist, the most promising psychiatrist in the country, Harry Edward Styles, it’s me”

Zayn didn’t know how to calm Harry down now that he’d started rambling, so he did the only thing he could think of, and grabbed his hand.

Harry shut up almost instantly, his eyes dropping to their entwined fingers and a small smile forming back on his face. “You never touch me” he said.

“I’m touching you now” Zayn exhaled, feeling his heart thump louder “Can you calm down and tell me about the pills, babe?”

“Babe” Harry whispered with a giggle “Yeah. The pills. They’re not what we think they are. I found out. Ben got mad. Christine didn’t kill herself. They made her”

_Are you lying, Harry? Please tell me you’re not lying, tell me you’re sane._ “Who’s they?”

“All of them” Harry said “All of them”

Zayn knew he was going against everything he’d learned, everything he knew, but he _believed_ Harry.

Because the thing was, if Harry was so lucid without the meds, and the meds were the reason he lied, then it meant Harry _didn’t lie at all_. Harry wasn’t a pathological liar, didn’t even have all the symptoms of that disease, he wasn’t lying now. “Harry, I want you to listen very carefully to me, okay?”

Harry nodded. “I always listen to you”

“Good. I want you to not take a single pill ever again. Louis won’t give them to you, and I listed him as your only nurse. I want you to try and keep the lies away from your mouth as hard as you can. Can you do that? Can you not lie to me?”

Harry nodded again. “I never want to lie. I hate it”

Zayn nodded too. “Okay, babe. I don’t want you to take any pills ever again. I want you to not tell _anyone_ you’re not taking them, do you understand? No one must know, apart from me and Louis”

“Louis is my friend. My best friend” Harry said in a whisper “I have to keep him safe”

Zayn smiled, because he knew, he _knew_ he’d been right. “Yes, babe. Louis is your best friend and I’ll help you keep him safe. Nobody has to know we’re not giving you the meds, okay?”

Harry nodded again.

“And, Harry. If someone else comes and wants you to take them, I want you to throw a fit. I want you to throw a fit so hard they will have to call me. Then, and only then, I want you to lie and look like you’re crazy. Can you do that for me, Harry? Can you lie for me in that case?”

Harry nodded again. “This is not protocol. They will take your license. You were interned too, weren’t you, Zayn? You were an insomniac. You still don’t sleep okay. I can see it in your eyes. I’m sure you worked so hard for this license, I don’t want you to throw it away”

Zayn felt his hand sweat in Harry’s. How could Harry know? How had he noticed so quickly, when not even Zayn’s actual psychiatrist had been able to diagnose him correctly for a long, long, unbearably long time?

_The most promising psychiatrist in the country, they said._

Zayn took a deep breath. “I don’t care about my license if it means saving you and your friends from whatever’s happening to you” he said, and he meant it.

Harry smiled. “It’s gonna be alright. You’ll save us” he just said.

Zayn, for some reason, believed him again.

 

*

 

Zayn had forced himself to abandon all thoughts of Harry while he went on with his shift, so that he could give all his attention to his other patients.

“You’re distracted, doctor Malik”

Elliot was smirking in Zayn’s direction when Zayn raised his eyes from his notepad and gaped. Zayn hadn’t been distracted, he knew how to do his job thank you very much, but Elliot hadn’t ever spoken more than one syllable words to Zayn in _any_ of their sessions, so the fact that he was speaking and smirking now felt extremely bizarre.

Zayn arched an eyebrow in his direction, and Elliot smirked again, lowering his gaze to the sheet Zayn had given him from his notepad. Elliot never spoke much, but he always asked Zayn for a blank piece of paper from his notepad, and then drew cartoon versions of Zayn during their sessions while Zayn did most of the talking.

“Why do you think I’m distracted, Elliot?”

Elliot shrugged. “I saw you outside with doctor Styles today. They never let him out” he answered, apropos of nothing at all.

“Do you know Harry, Elliot?” Zayn asked, feeling his heart flutter anxiously.

Elliot nodded. “He was my doctor. He’s cool. His hair always made for sick cartoons” he muttered, apparently very concentrated on the shading in his drawing “I thought I’d still get to see him even if he’s gone batshit, but they never let him out of the psycho ward”

Zayn stared at Elliot, his brain pulling apart the info he’d just been freely given. Zayn had always thought it was extremely weird that Elliot had been signed in the institute for anorexia, but then had had to stay even when he’d almost healed because he’d suddenly gone practically mute. It had happened shortly after Harry had been interned, now that Zayn knew to look for the connection.

“Elliot, can I ask you a question?” Zayn asked.

Elliot raised his head, and quirked an eyebrow, and Zayn didn’t need him to speak to know the answer. _All you do is ask your questions, doctor Malik, it doesn’t mean you’ll get an answer._

Zayn smiled and asked anyway. “Did you consciously stop speaking so that you could stay here after doctor Styles became a patient?”

Elliot lowered his head again, and didn’t answer, as Zayn already knew he wouldn’t. But the way he gripped his pencil harder, the way his fingers flinched, Zayn noticed it.

He sighed, and noted down Elliot’s name in his notepad.

Elliot didn’t speak for the rest of their session, but at the end of it, he presented Zayn with a superhero version of him. The background was a big explosion with a huge ‘ZAP!’ on top of it, he was fighting with his notepad hooked to his belt and his pen as a sword, and he was clearly defending a very curly man with huge eyes by holding out his arm to shield him.

As soon as he was done with his sessions, the thought of going away without even checking up on Harry was unbearable to Zayn, so he took a left turn after he passed his office, and gently knocked on Harry’s door.

Harry didn’t answer, but when Zayn entered the room using his key-card, he was awake, sitting on his bed, and he raised a set of sad eyes to Zayn.

Zayn smiled and closed the door, not going to sit on the usual chair at the opposite end of the room, but not daring to sit next to Harry on the bed either.

Harry smiled sadly. “I feel so myself” he almost whispered.

Zayn’s stomach lurched. “That’s… that’s good, right?”

“No” Harry muttered “It’s not good, because I perfectly remember all the things I said and I feel like a nutcase, and I know it was the meds, but I still am fucked in the head ‘cause of them. And I don’t remember the reason they did this to me, but I know I knew”

Zayn took a step forward. _There go all my attempts at having a normal doctor-patient relationship with him_ , he thought, _because he’s not crazy, he’s not a liar, he shouldn’t be here._

Harry looked at Zayn and slowly patted the bed, so Zayn sighed and sat next to him. “I know I’m sane” Harry said “And I know you believe me. But sometimes I still think lies and I’m about to say them. What if they fucked up my head forever, Zayn? What if I’ll never heal?”

“Harry” Zayn breathed “They’ve been giving you those pills for months. You know probably better than me that you can’t expect the effects to vanish in less than forty-eight hours. I’m honestly surprised all it took was not give you the pills for two days to make the real you come out so clearly”

Harry chuckled. “I always prided myself on having a very strong brain” he said.

Zayn smiled, his heart constricting a little bit. “I’m sorry I didn’t notice it was the pills, Harry. I’m sorry it took me a whole month to realize something was wrong with you, Niall, Liam and your diagnoses”

“It’s not your fault, babe” Harry replied, entwining their fingers on Zayn’s knee and looking at him with big, green eyes “Not even Louis noticed, and he’s known us for years. You never even knew who I was before. You couldn’t have noticed”

It was so crazy how _sane_ Harry was in reality, how that was probably the first real conversation they were having, and yet Harry still had to be locked in that room. “I don’t wanna leave you here” Zayn confessed honestly, because all there had been between them before that day had been lies, and Zayn was tired of them, and Harry was probably even more tired.

Harry smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted you to leave since you started working here” he said.

Zayn thought his eyes looked so _different_ when he was telling the truth, and something melted in his heart at the thought.

“I’m gonna stay here tonight” Zayn decided “I’ll take a double shift or something and I’ll stay”

“No” Harry gently replied “You’re gonna go home and I’ll see you tomorrow morning for our session”

“Harry, I…”

“Zayn” he interrupted him, more firmly, but still with a smile “Don’t you understand? We can’t have anyone think something’s changed. It’s dangerous for you, for me, for Niall and Liam, for Louis. So you’re gonna go home, and you’re gonna _sleep_ , okay?”

Zayn reluctantly nodded.

“And tomorrow” Harry added with another smile “We can keep pretending I’m crazy, and we can keep pretending we don’t love each other, and we can think of a way to get out of this fucking mess”

Zayn choked on his own spit, and he never felt _less_ like a psychiatrist than in that moment, when a guy who was supposed to be his patient had been able to read _him_ like an open book.

Harry laughed, a brief giggle that made something warm up in Zayn’s chest. “Sorry, didn’t mean to kill you with my love” he said “Well, assuming the feeling’s mutual. I didn’t mean to just, you know, take for granted that you like me as well. But if you did, I’d be glad. And I swear I’ll take you out properly when I get out of this shithole. And yeah, the rambles were all me”

Zayn laughed. Because yeah, the rambles were all Harry, and they made little to no sense anyway, even if he was sane, good, present.

Zayn wanted to kiss him, but he couldn’t, not until Harry was there, because if he let himself cross that line, he wouldn’t be able to think properly anymore. And he needed his mind at its best if he wanted to get those three people out of there. So he just leaned in, resting his forehead against Harry’s, and Harry sighed a smile and closed his eyes. “Another place, another time” Zayn whispered, their noses bumping together.

Harry nodded. “Another place, another time” he agreed.

Zayn didn’t know how long they stayed like that, but he knew detaching himself from Harry and standing up was one of the most difficult things he’d ever done.

“Zayn?” Harry called for him after a moment.

“Yeah, Harry”

“I don’t remember a lot of things about this mess” he said “Do you think I will remember eventually?”

Zayn smiled. “I’d be a shitty fucking shrink if I didn’t help you remember, wouldn’t I?”

Harry chuckled. “Yeah, I suppose you would. Goodnight, babe”

“Goodnight, babe” Zayn replied “And, Harry. No pills. Remember what I told you this morning”

Harry nodded. “No pills. No one has to know. If anyone wants to make me take ‘em, I throw a fit so hard they have to call you” he listed surely.

Zayn took a deep, relieved breath, and nodded. “Goodnight, Harry”

Harry smiled. “Goodnight, Zayn. I hope you sleep like a rock”

 

*

 

Zayn didn’t exactly sleep like a rock, although it wasn’t because of his usually fitful sleep, but rather the fact that he couldn’t stop thinking about Harry. Not that it was any big news, because Zayn hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Harry since the day he met him.

Now, though, it was different, because Zayn could begin to see _something_ more than a patient, he could allow himself to get closer to him, because he was _sane_ , not beyond help, and Zayn would do anything in his power to help him.

The thought made him jittery, and he couldn’t fight the smile that he felt creeping on his face as he stepped into St. Thomas the morning after.

He barely had time to climb the stairs to the second floor where his office was, and he was attacked by a very dishevelled Louis. “Wait before starting smiling like a teenager in love, doc” Louis said gravely “Barlow’s in Harry’s room with him. He sent me away. I was about to call you”

Zayn took a ragged breath and he covered the distance to Harry’s room in three strides. He didn’t even bother to knock, just used his key-card, his heart threatening to hammer its way out of his chest.

“Zayn!” Harry giggled when he caught sight of him “This is Henry Barlow, he’s my father”

_No no no no no, that’s a lie, why are you lying, you were so sane yesterday, did he give you the pills, no no no no._

Zayn forced out a calm smile. “Is he? Then why are your surnames different, Harry?” he asked patiently, and through his peripheral view he saw Barlow smirk.

Harry shrugged. “I dunno. He’s my father though. Dad, this is Zayn, my boyfriend”

Zayn arched his eyebrows at Barlow, and the man laughed. “Sometimes his lies catch even me by surprise” he said, patting Zayn on the shoulder “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. He’s always been a flirt after all”

Zayn felt his heart break at the thought all the progress they’d made the day before had just been somehow destroyed by Barlow, but then the man stood up and looked at Zayn, giving Harry his back, and Harry fucking _winked_ at Zayn, bringing his index to his lips.

“Why are you here, Mr. Barlow?” Zayn asked, feeling like he wanted to burst out laughing. _He’s still sane, he’s lying but not to me, he’s okay._

Barlow stared at Zayn. “I wanted to make sure Harry was comfortable. A change of doctors can be intense for some patients”

_Yeah, by the way, why did Ben Winston even go away? Where is he?_ “I see” Zayn replied coldly “Are Harry’s conditions to your liking, then?”

“Why did you list Tomlinson as Harry’s only nurse, doctor Malik?” Barlow asked back.

_Shit._ “Harry has been… reticent with taking his pills, lately. But he obediently takes them if Tomlinson’s the one giving them to him. I just thought it would make things easier”

“I see” Barlow muttered “I wonder why Harry took a liking to nurse Tomlinson?”

_Motherfucker._ “I honestly have no idea” Zayn replied calmly.

“Louis is my brother!” Harry supplied helpfully.

_No wonder they chose to write you off as a liar, babe. You’re an ace actor._ Zayn stared eloquently at Barlow, and Barlow sighed, nodding. “I guess it’s time for me to leave you to your session, then. Have a nice day” he stated, and retreated.

“Bye Dad” Harry smiled and waved at him.

Barlow waved back, and closed the door behind him.

“Fucking piece of shit” Harry muttered as soon as Barlow was out of earshot, frowning “No pill could ever make me think you’re my _father_ , for Christ’s sakes”

Zayn had to physically restrain himself from kissing him. “You scared the shit out of me” he commented.

Harry chuckled and batted his eyelashes. “Took a drama course in high school” he said, and then bit down on his lower lip, staring at his fingers “It’s true, I swear. I even have a diploma hung on my bedroom wall, at home”

Zayn smiled and gently put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Babe? Look up?”

Harry did.

“I believe you” Zayn told him “So don’t just assume I am assuming you’re lying”

Harry chuckled. “You really are a good shrink” he stated, and stood up “So, will you go out with me?”

Zayn rolled his eyes and moved to open the door with his key-card. “Yes, Harry Styles” he conceded.

Harry giggled and hip-checked him as he followed him out of the room and to the benches in the outside yard.

“Did you stop giving the meds to Niall and Liam as well?” Harry asked in a whisper when they sat down in the yard, after both of them looked around inconspicuously to make sure no one was listening.

Zayn shook his head. “No. We can’t, Harry. The change would be too evident with them. We can’t risk it”

Harry nodded. “I understand. It’s just… it’s not fair, Zayn. That they have to keep being crazy”

“I know, babe, I know. I’ll figure it out, I promise”

Harry nodded again. “Zayn? Last night… I thought about something”

“What?”

“I was thinking about when I used to be a psychiatrist. What’s your most prized possession as a doctor, Zayn?”

“My notepad” Zayn replied instantly “I can’t work without it”

Harry smiled. “Me neither. I had a patient once, his name was Elliot. He was very good at drawing. Whenever we had our sessions, he asked me for a blank sheet out of my notepad, and…”

“He drew cartoons of you while you talked” Zayn completed for him “I know. Elliot is still here. He does the same with me”

Harry’s eyes watered instantly. “He’s still here?” he asked, voice shaking “We… we were so close to the end of it with him, Zayn. I didn’t manage to complete his treatment before they locked me up. He should have gone home in probably a month”

Zayn wished so hard he could have hugged Harry, but he couldn’t risk being seen by anyone in the hospital. “You did almost heal him, Harry” Zayn admitted “He’s eating fairly normally now. He hasn’t gone home ‘cause shortly after you were interned, Elliot stopped speaking”

Harry widened his eyes. “What?”

Zayn nodded defeatedly. “Took me almost a month to make him say more than two words to me” he said. He thought that for now it wasn’t necessary for Harry to know Elliot had probably gone into his mutism on purpose, and that it had to do with Harry himself.

Harry sighed. “He’s never been one of the easy ones”

“So, what were you saying about the notepad?” Zayn redirected the conversation back to the original topic, because it was true Harry was extremely more lucid now, but he still lost track of his thoughts very easily.

Harry licked his lips, and Zayn focused on his eyes to avoid noticing how pink his mouth was. “Yeah. So. I always noted down things. I had a shitton of notepads and diaries and notebooks. I don’t remember what I was writing in my diary before Christine died and I lost my mind. But I’m sure I wrote everything down”

Zayn’s heart started to thump excitedly. “Do you remember where your diary is, Harry?”

Harry nodded. “I always brought it home with me at the end of my day here. I’m sure I left it in my room, because the night Christine died I remember going out with Niall, Liam and Louis, and I didn’t bring the diary with me. I never went home after that night. So it must still be there”

Zayn frantically nodded, looking around and making sure they were still alone. “Good, good, that’s good. Do you think they would go as far as to break into your place to get rid of your notes?”

Harry chuckled and shook his head. “I lived with Louis, Zayn. I’m pretty sure even if they tried, they would have met a massive obstacle in the form of a skinny man from Doncaster” he said “But I don’t think they ever tried. Because if they did, that would have somehow alerted Louis. And he would have understood something was wrong ages ago”

That was true, Zayn thought. There was no way Louis would have stayed oblivious if someone from the hospital had tried to take things from Harry’s room.

“We’ll check” Zayn assured Harry “If you wrote something important, we’ll find out”

“Don’t let Barlow notice you’re friends with Louis, Zayn” Harry said pensively, looking at something in the distance “He already suspects you’re onto something”

“What did he tell you? This morning, before I came here?”

Harry shrugged. “Not much, but he was asking questions. About you. About what we say in our sessions, if I like you, if I’m comfortable with you. And it’s not out of the kindness of his own heart, ‘cause he never gave a shit about any patients, so I highly doubt he gives a shit about me in that sense. He also repeatedly asked me if you were friends with Louis, so I don’t think it’s wise to let him know that you are. I told him a bunch of shit, complete nonsense, and he stopped trying after a while”

Zayn nodded. Barlow had to be involved somehow, there was no way he had nothing to do with all that mess. He’d been weird from day one, when he’d so nonchalantly tried to postpone Zayn’s first visit to the LTCS ward, and his frequent questions about how Zayn was working didn’t sound like a director simply asking info about his patients. Also, he clearly didn’t want Zayn to know where the meds were kept, and that had been what had thrown off Zayn the most in the first place.

Harry smiled a little bit, still looking at something in front of him, and when he raised his hand to wave at someone, Zayn followed his eyes.

Walking along the gravel pathway that circled the yard were Louis and Elliot. Elliot was waving at Harry with a small smile himself. “Elliot was friends with Christine” Harry murmured “I think they could have loved each other, given the chance. I think a lot of people could love each other, given the chance”

 

*

 

Louis and Zayn took care of being seen leave the hospital separately that night, and they met in front of the apartment Louis had once shared with Harry, away from the hospital’s peering eyes.

“I feel like a fucking psycho, looking around to make sure we’re not being followed all the fucking time” Louis muttered angrily as he opened the door to his house to let both Zayn and himself in.

Zayn sighed. “We gotta be careful” he just said.

Louis grunted an unintelligible reply and gestured for Zayn to come upstairs with him without even bothering to turn on the light. Zayn shared his urgency.

When they stopped in front of a door in the middle of the upstairs corridor, Louis took a deep breath and opened it, flicking the light switch at the entrance.

Harry’s room was very neat and clean, was Zayn’s first thought. It only had a queen-sized bed in the middle, with a small nightstand next to it, a closet on the opposite wall, and a fairly big desk placed right in front of the window. Three bookshelves were nailed to the wall, full of books with cracked backs and curling corners due to thorough reading. Zayn smiled a bit to himself when he noticed Harry had indeed framed and hung his high school drama course diploma.

Not even the thinnest layer of dust was in sight.

“I… I keep it clean” Louis said sheepishly “I guess I never totally gave up on Harry coming home”

“Well, Louis, good call, ‘cause he is” Zayn replied as earnestly as he could.

“You get the desk, I get the closet?” Louis just asked.

Zayn nodded, and immediately started to examine the things left on Harry’s desk. A couple of battered psychiatry books on insomnia were open on their sections about sleepwalking for some reason. A stack of stationary stamped with ‘Doc. Harry Styles, Psychiatrist’ was placed by a leather penholder with four black biros. Next to it, a medical prescription block also stamped with Harry’s name was placed. Harry’s laptop was also on the desk, but Zayn didn’t turn it on yet, because Harry had asked him to look for his diaries and notepads first.

The drawers just contained a bunch of random things, from new pencils and notebooks to stray condoms and an unopened bottle of lube, which Zayn promptly ignored, until he reached the last drawer and tried to open it. It was locked.

“Louis?” Zayn called out “Do you know where Harry keeps the key to the drawers?”

Louis hummed. “What? He never locks his drawers”

“Well, he did the last time he was here, for some reason. Do you have the key?”

“I think it’s in his…” Louis murmured and moved to the nightstand, starting to rummage through what looked like very colourful socks, until he chuckled victoriously and produced a small key “Hazza, Hazza” he said fondly, handing it to Zayn “He always said the best way to hide stuff was inside a sock, ‘cause it’s so obvious no one’s ever gonna think you would actually do it”

Zayn smiled at that, and used the key to open the drawer. A leather-bound diary was the only thing he found inside of it, and his stomach flipped in victory as he took it out of the drawer.

“I think I found Harry’s diary” he said to Louis, who stopped rummaging through the closet to look at him.

He nodded. “Yeah, that’s it, that’s Haz’s diary”

They both sat at Harry’s desk with it; Louis flicked the desk lamp on, and Zayn blinked at the sudden brightness for a moment before he opened the diary and they started reading through it.

The diary must have been a new one, because Louis said that the date of the first paragraph corresponded to shortly before Christine started to get worse.

It was true, because there were only a few pages of notes on other patients before Harry’s handwriting started to become more frantic, less legible even, as he noted down the involution of Christine’s condition.

_Meds are not working_ , Harry had written a week before Christine’s death. _Niall and Liam think the meds are making her worse. Look into that._

“Why didn’t they tell me?” Louis whispered, more to himself than to Zayn.

Zayn didn’t answer, and kept reading over Harry’s notes.

_Patient sleepwalking? I didn’t think it was necessary to lock her room, I went to wish her a good night and she wasn’t in it. She came back a moment later and said she’d gone to the toilet. When I asked her why she didn’t use the one inside her room she didn’t answer, and she went back to bed and was sleeping in a matter of seconds._

“Sleepwalking” Zayn uttered under his breath, looking at the open books on the desk “Harry was researching on sleepwalking”

_Christine is definitely sleepwalking_ , he kept reading. _This should not be happening. Something wrong with her meds._

_I asked Barlow to see the stash of meds. He didn’t want me to._

_Ben is being weird. Stayed at work after I left, was already there when I came back in the morning._

_Christine is scared of Ben. I don’t know why._

There was a three-day gap between that note and the following, and Harry’s handwriting was totally fucked, like he couldn’t write fast enough. That note was also the last, the date corresponding to the day before Christine died.

_Niall and Liam found out Ben is taking care of distributing the meds. How can he be qualified to do that? He’s not even a psychiatrist here yet, he’s still just shadowing me._

_The meds are not what we think they are. It’s Barlow and Ben. I talked to Ben, we fought. He knows I know. I’ll tell Niall and Liam tonight._

_Christine is getting worse worse worse. She sleepwalks every night. I recorded her. She told me something through the camera last night. It was in Danish. Elliot translated it for me. Elliot knows all of it._

The note ended with some kind of code neither Zayn nor Louis could understand. _ELC45. Tell Elliot._

“What the fuck do you mean, Haz” Louis grunted, driving his fingers through his hair.

Zayn’s heart and mind were going a mile a minute. “Elliot” he murmured “I need to speak to Elliot”

“Elliot barely says four words to you in your sessions, Zayn” Louis reminded him harshly.

“What if it’s ‘cause of Harry? What if it’s ‘cause of fucking _Ben_?” Zayn retorted “What if he doesn’t trust me ‘cause he knows what happened to Harry and he knows it was Ben’s fault? Harry told me Elliot was very close to Christine. Louis, look at what Harry _wrote_ ” he shoved the diary in front of Louis “He’s _telling us to go to Elliot_ , don’t you see? Harry fucking _knew_ they were gonna do something to him, and he was sure _you_ would look for his diary, so the last thing he wrote was how you were gonna get your answers”

Louis stared at Harry’s last page of notes for a moment, and then sighed. “Okay, let’s say we speak to Elliot. What…”

Zayn’s phone buzzing with an incoming call interrupted Louis, and he gestured for Zayn to take the call. Zayn’s breath hitched in his throat when he saw St. Thomas’s number flashing on the screen, and answered as fast as he could.

“Hello?”

“Doctor Malik?” the voice of some nurse said in an agitated tone “Doctor Malik, you have to come to the hospital. Harry Styles is threatening to kill himself”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like cliffhangers, sorry.  
> Let me know what you think!


	4. Meds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry raised his head. “Elliot? Did you say ‘all that happened’?”  
> “Yeah?”  
> “Do you know what happened? Can you tell us?”  
> The kid just widened his eyes at Harry. “You don’t remember, doctor Styles?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: The plot of this story revolves around mental illnesses. Reader discretion is advised. If you think you might be sensitive about the themes listed in the tags, please please please do not read this story.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't know or own any of the characters. I only own the plot and the original characters.

 

 

 

Zayn tripped twice on the stairs of the hospital as he ran as fast as he could to the second floor. He had barely had the presence of mind to beg Louis to wait in the car until he called him, because if Barlow was there and he saw them come in together, they might as well be dead. Or worse.

He heard Harry’s screams as soon as he entered the corridor.

“Doctor Malik!” a woman in the hospital’s nurse uniform – Madison, her nametag said – ran to him, eyes wide “Doctor Malik, we don’t know how to stop him”

“What happened? Tell me what happened!” Zayn demanded as they both made their way towards Harry’s room.

“You wrote in his folder that sedatives are not to be used with Styles” Madison said “So we didn’t. That’s why we called you”

Zayn felt a pang of nausea rise up, because he knew exactly what was the only thing that would make Harry throw a fit. “Did someone try to give him his pills? Answer me!”

Madison nodded. “Yeah, we did, doctor Malik”

“I listed _Tomlinson_ as the one in charge of Harry’s pills. Are you _Tomlinson_?” he asked her, trying to come across as just pissed instead of fucking scared and angry.

Madison flinched. “No, no, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but Mr. Barlow told me, before he left, that I needed to make sure Harry got his pills tonight, so I did”

Zayn felt his hands shake, so he grabbed Madison’s shoulder to mask it. “I understand. And I’m sorry I snapped” he said as calmly as he could “But _I_ am the psychiatrist, and _I_ decide when Harry is gonna have his pills. Am I clear?”

Madison nodded.

Zayn nodded too, and strode to Harry’s room.

Two nurses were trying to carefully approach Harry as he was standing on his bed, his back to the wall, screaming his lungs out at them.

“Leave me alone!” he shouted “Leave me alone or I’m gonna kill myself! I’m gonna bang my fucking head to the wall until I break my skull open and…”

“Harry” Zayn called out for him.

Harry’s head whipped sideways to look at Zayn, and his eyes were huge in his face, his beautiful face that Zayn had done nothing but watch in the past month.

“Leave us alone” Zayn told the two nurses.

The one closest to Zayn frowned. “Doctor Malik, he needs sedatives, he’s being violent, he tried to scratch our faces”

“ _I said leave us alone_ ” Zayn gritted out “No sedatives. I’ll calm him down. Leave”

“Okay. But call us if you need us” the other nurse said in a worried tone.

“I won’t” Zayn assured, and stood still as they crossed the room and got out of it, closing the door behind their backs.

Harry immediately jumped off the bed and started crying. Zayn didn’t even think about it. He grabbed Harry by the hips and held him close, hugging him while he buried his face in Zayn’s neck and cried some more. “I was so scared they were gonna make me take the pills and I would start lying again and they wouldn’t call you, I was so scared I didn’t even need to pretend I was throwing a fit” he moaned.

Zayn shushed him. “You’re safe, babe, you’re safe, I’m here” he whispered.

Harry nodded frantically. “Are you gonna stay?”

“Yes. Yes, Harry, I’m not gonna leave” he murmured.

Harry calmed down a little bit at that, and Zayn made him sit on the bed while retrieving his phone to call Louis.

“Zayn what the fuck is happening?” Louis shouted upon answering.

“It’s fine. It’s fine, they didn’t give him any pills. He’s okay, I’m staying here for the night, and Barlow’s not here, so you can come too” Zayn answered.

“Fucking hell” Louis just said, and ended the call.

Harry chuckled a little and sniffled. “He gets so pissy when he’s worried”

Zayn laughed. “I noticed, babe”

Harry stayed silent for a moment, his hand finding Zayn’s and squeezing it.

“Harry?” Zayn called him.

“Yeah?”

“Do you wanna talk about Elliot?” Zayn asked carefully.

Harry frowned. “What about Elliot?”

“Do you think he could know something about all this?”

Harry widened his eyes and then pushed the heels of his hands against them, nervously shaking his head. “I don’t remember why don’t I remember I don’t I don’t I don’t”

“Harry. Harry, it’s fine” Zayn quickly amended “It’s fine, babe, look at me”

Harry slowly raised his head. “I don’t remember, Zayn” he said, tears streaking his cheeks.

Zayn nodded. “I know. I know, it’s okay. We’ll figure it out”

Harry rested his head on Zayn’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I’m such a nutcase”

Zayn chuckled. “I mean, that’s how you grabbed my attention, so I wouldn’t be too sorry”

Harry giggled a little bit, but before he could reply the door clicked open and he jolted, getting impossibly closer to Zayn.

It was just Louis, though, followed by someone.

The someone was Elliot, his blonde curls dishevelled as if he’d been sleeping just moments earlier, and a sheepish expression on his face.

Louis gently ushered him inside the room and closed the door again. “I found this one wandering suspiciously close to this corridor” he said, ruffling Elliot’s hair.

Elliot scrunched his nose and then stared at Harry. “I’m sorry, I know I should be in bed, but I heard you scream, doctor Styles, and I was afraid they were gonna do something to you as well, so I snuck out of my room and I came here to make sure you were okay”

And well, Zayn didn’t think he’d managed to get _that many words_ out of Elliot’s mouth in all their sessions put together, if he was completely honest.

Harry was staring at Elliot with his mouth agape. “How… how did you call me?”

Elliot shrugged. “Doctor Styles. That’s what you are. I know you’re not a doctor anymore, but you still are to me. I miss you”

Harry’s eyes watered dangerously, but he quickly wiped the tears with the tips of his fingers and then smiled at Elliot. “I miss you too, Elliot. Zayn told me you became a mute?” he arched an eyebrow.

Elliot worriedly eyed Zayn and scratched the back of his head. “Yeah, sorry about that. I didn’t trust him after all that happened. But I think he’s cool”

Harry looked at Zayn and smiled. “He is pretty cool” he agreed, but then he frowned and looked back at Elliot “Elliot? Did you say ‘all that happened’?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know what happened? Can you tell us?” Harry stood up and slowly approached Elliot. Zayn thought it wasn’t the best of calls, because Elliot didn’t like people in his personal space, but he seemed unfazed by Harry getting closer.

The kid just widened his eyes at Harry. “You don’t remember, doctor Styles?”

Harry shook his head. “No. I forgot. They made me forget when they started giving me some kind of meds”

“The meds?” Elliot asked, complete and utter horror displayed on his young face “They gave you the bad meds? Like with Christine?”

Louis and Zayn exchanged a glance, but neither of them interrupted their conversation, because Elliot was probably the only person – well, _good_ person at least – to know what had happened in that hospital.

Elliot stared at Harry some more. “You knew this was gonna happen, doctor Styles” he slowly said to Harry, narrowing his eyes “You told me something was gonna happen to you. And you told me that if _anyone_ asked me, _you_ included, I shouldn’t say anything unless they gave me the code”

Harry shook his head. “I’m so sorry I threw you into this mess, Elliot, I’m so sorry, but I swear I’m okay now, I need to know what happened because I don’t remember and I need to remember to get my friends out of here and…”

“ELC45” Zayn said out loud.

The whole room seemed to freeze after that.

Harry stared at Zayn with a frown, because of course he didn’t understand what Zayn had just said. Louis looked expectantly at Elliot.

Elliot looked at Zayn, instead, and he had a light blush to his cheeks when he spoke again. “Yeah. That’s the code” he nodded “Now you adults find a way for us to go to the basement without anyone noticing, ‘cause that’s where I’m supposed to take you”

Harry frowned. “The basement? Elliot, it’s not safe down there!”

Elliot laughed and shook his head in Harry’s direction. “Yeah, doctor Styles, last time we went down there you were freaking out about rats biting you and giving you the black plague”

Harry gasped indignantly, and Zayn didn’t even know if it was because of Elliot exposing his fear of rats, or because he didn’t remember ever going to the basement with the kid.

“What does the code mean? You know, before we risk our lives” Louis asked as he opened the door just slightly, just to peek through the crack and make sure the corridor was empty.

Elliot looked at the ground with a sad tilt to his mouth. “Elliot Loves Christine” he explained in a mutter “45 is something we’ll need later”

Harry sighed, and pulled Elliot to his chest, hugging him. The kid didn’t mind the contact, and wrapped his arms around Harry’s back, while Zayn watched them feeling like a thorn was puncturing his heart.

“I’m glad you’ve not gone batshit, doctor Styles” Elliot said after a second.

Harry smiled, and ruffled his hair. “Me too, kid”

 

*

 

“There are rats down here. They’re gonna give us the black plague” Harry declared in a worried whisper as they all moved blindly after Elliot in the darkness of the basement.

“Shut up, Haz, this is all your fault” Louis retorted “Whatever you needed to hide, there was no reason to hide it _here_ ”

“Well, Louis, I don’t remember ever coming here of my own free will, but I had to have my motives, didn’t I?”

“Jesus, will you two _shut up_?” Elliot hissed “If anyone finds us here we’re worse than dead”

“I agree with the kid” Zayn offered.

“Not a kid” Elliot muttered, guiding them through corridors Zayn would have gotten lost through if he’d gone down there alone.

“So what’s 45?” Harry asked Elliot as they reached a small unused room. Zayn could feel the years and years of dust scratch his throat every time he took a breath.

“It’s an archive number” Elliot said “Any of you have a phone? We need light”

Zayn fished his phone from his pocket and turned on the flashlight on it, giving it to Elliot.

Elliot took it and pointed it to a piece of furniture with a set of dusty drawers labelled 44, 45, 46. “We came down here the day before Christine died” he told Harry “You had a box and some kind of blue paper sheet. You put them here, in the drawer number 45, and then you told me that if everything went as you thought it would, I would be the only one to remember about it”

Harry took a shaky breath. “So I knew something was gonna happen to me?”

Elliot nodded. “Yeah. You didn’t tell me anything more. You only said you brought me with you ‘cause you needed someone else to know, and you couldn’t tell any of your friends ‘cause it was too risky. You said nobody was ever gonna think you told one of your patients, so I would be safe”

Harry nodded, and slowly pulled the drawer open. There was indeed a box and a blue card inside of it, buried under other piles of old documents and folders which probably were remnants of the hospital’s past endeavours.

Zayn didn’t speak as Harry took out the box and the card with shaking hands. He could see Harry’s frown and worried eyes in the light of his phone held by Elliot, but he let Harry be the one to examine the objects first, because he knew Harry needed it.

When he unfolded the sheet, they found a note written in Harry’s handwriting.

_Dear myself,_

_If you’re reading this, you’ve been caught and you don’t remember shit, but you read your own diary and talked to Elliot. In the box you’ll find a hard drive with Christine’s recording, and a translation for what she’ll say in Danish. Watch it, and find a way to send Barlow and Ben to fucking jail._

_All the love,_

_Yourself._

“So this is really about Christine?” Elliot asked coldly after they all peered over Harry’s shoulder to read the note.

Harry nodded. “Yeah, Elliot. Whatever they did to me, Niall and Liam, they did it ‘cause we tried to save Christine”

Elliot took a breath and didn’t speak for a while. “Well then. I have a tv in my room. Do you wanna watch a horror movie?”

 

*

 

Zayn thought that if someone ever told him he’d end up in the room of a kid with an eating disorder, with a man who had been falsely diagnosed with pathological lying and a nurse, to watch a tape about a dead insomniac, he would have asked them if they wanted to get an appointment for a session with him.

And yet there he was, sitting on Elliot’s bed with Harry and Louis while the kid got the telly working.

“A _recording_ , Haz?” Louis hissed “You fucking _recorded_ a patient and didn’t think to tell me?”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t fucking remember, Lou, but my guess is that I couldn’t fucking tell you ‘cause then you would be living in LTCS ward room 36 right now”

Louis seemed to deflate. “Sorry, Haz”

“It’s fine” Harry said, patting him on the shoulder “I get how frustrated you are, but I would never hide anything from you if I had a choice and you know”

“I liked you better when you were crazy” Louis grunted, but nobody believed him.

“I didn’t think shrinks thought they were the bloody CIA” Elliot commented, turning the tv on “Your hard drive has a password, doctor Styles” he showed them the window asking for an entrance code when he tried to open the folder.

“Monica” Harry said surely “The password’s Monica”

Elliot typed it in, and sure enough, the folder opened.

Zayn frowned at Harry, and Harry shrugged. “I really like _Friends_ ” he said, and Zayn, despite it all, had to hold back a laugh.

“It’s working. I can play it whenever you’re ready” Elliot said.

“I doubt we’ll ever be totally ready for whatever this is” Zayn murmured, getting serious again “But go ahead”

Elliot played the video, and sat down by his desk.

The first scene was Harry in his white coat, sitting in a chair, while a thin, blonde girl was laying down on a bed in front of him.

“This is an infringement of privacy, doc” the girl, Christine, said.

Harry chuckled. “You don’t like being recorded?”

“Took Elliot three months to convince me to take a selfie, you be the judge of that”

Harry sighed. “I’m afraid it’s the only thing I could think of, sweetheart. Now, do you want to tell me about the nightmares?”

Christine took a deep breath. “I dream about monsters, most of the time. They chase me. They catch me. And they make me do stuff. It’s always the same nightmare, over and over again. The monsters make me kill things. I’m covered in blood. Then I go wash myself, and I go back home”

“What do the monsters look like?” Harry asked.

Christine turned her head to stare at him for a while. “They have weird shapes. They’re green, blue, and yellow, with furs and horns. But sometimes they look like humans”

“What do they look like when they’re human?” Harry insisted, leaning over a little bit, to get closer to Christine without moving his chair.

Christine stared back at the ceiling. “Sometimes they look like doctor Winston”

“Why Ben?”

“He scares me”

“Why, Christine?”

Christine shrugged. “He gives me meds. I don’t like meds”

“You always take your meds willingly”

“He gives me all kinds of meds, doctor Styles” she replied “I’m tired. Can we stop?”

“Yeah, Christine, we can stop for today” Harry conceded, and Zayn could see the deep frown on his face.

“Fucking Ben” Harry next to him muttered “Fucking Ben was right next to me ruining my patient and I didn’t notice”

“Well, Haz, if this is what we think it is, fucking Ben ruined you too, and we didn’t notice” Louis said grimly.

The scene changed abruptly, and it looked like it was night. Harry was staring at the camera with deep eyebags, his face thin and pale. “I am going to record Christine’s sleep tonight, because I firmly believe she is sleepwalking, and I need to be sure” he said “I know this is against protocol and I will take full responsibility for it, but Christine is slowly slipping through my fingers, and I won’t allow it. If tonight’s recording will be a dead end as well, I will immediately delete it and I will give up and come to terms with the fact that I have to intern Christine forever”

Harry moved to place the camera, which probably was very small for how easily he manoeuvred it, setting it on a desk, and Zayn could clearly see the sleeping figure of Christine in the bed, which explained the hushed tone in which Harry had spoken.

The recording was uneventful for more than twenty minutes, but none of them spoke anyway, and Zayn found the silence so eerie he stopped looking at the tv for a while, focusing his eyes on Harry, who was tense and rigid next to him, staring at the telly like it was about to explode any moment.

And, to be fair, it kind of did.

Christine slowly stood up from the bed, and Zayn thought she was going to go out of the room, but she stepped right in front of the camera, smiling, and starting to speak a weird language Zayn knew was Danish.

“Stop stop stop!” Harry exclaimed “Elliot, pause it. I need to look at the translation”

Elliot, who was the one who had translated Christine’s speech in the first place and therefore knew what she was saying, just nodded and stared at the paused frame of Christine while Harry scrambled for the piece of paper inside the box.

_Doctor Styles, I know you’re recording me, and I will take you with me because I want you to see what they make me do every night. They’re controlling me with the pills. They’re using my insomnia to control me when I sleep. The meds are not normal. Stop them._

Zayn felt like all his organs had detached themselves from his body. _Control her through her insomnia?_ “Harry, is this possible? Is it possible to control someone and _make_ them sleepwalk through meds?”

“Yes” Harry said coldly, still staring at the paper “I studied it. Hell, I did my fucking PhD project on it. There are people who have been arrested for trying to produce those kinds of meds. They’ve been existing since the second world war”

“What?” Zayn hissed “How can you control insomnia?”

Harry shook his head. “You don’t control the insomnia, you _use it_. Those meds don’t have any effect on people with healthy, sane brains. They don’t even work on people with fucked brains but with a normal sleep schedule. They work on insomniacs ‘cause their sleep is weak, and so easily manipulated” he wiped at his eyes “Christine didn’t get worse for no reason. She got worse ‘cause they substituted her real meds with _those_ pills” he added angrily.

“But how can you make someone do _something specific_ while sleepwalking?” Louis asked.

Harry gulped down. “You brainwash them when they’re awake” he slowly said “It’s not easy. Only a psychiatrist could do it. It’s like a sort of hypnosis. You slowly slip something into a conversation with a patient, one word at a time each day, until all they can think about is that, until they can only do _that_ when they sleep. It’s…” he interrupted himself, gasping like he’d been shot, and crumbling the paper in his hand “Fuck. Fuck. This has something to do with animals. Ben was always casually mentioning animals to Christine ‘cause she liked them, but maybe it wasn’t to ease her, maybe…”

“You’re remembering, doc” Elliot said grimly, and pressed play again.

Christine had taken the camera with her, and secured it to her belt, or probably in her pocket or something, because the visual was pretty stable. She went out the door and through the corridor in the LTCS ward, until the very end of it.

“How the fuck did she get out? The door should be locked” Louis hissed.

Harry took a ragged breath. “Ben was in charge of locking the doors” he just murmured, the implication being, of course, that Ben left Christine’s door open on purpose.

Christine in the video kept walking, and then slowly climbed down the stairs to the window. She opened it, and gracefully jumped off it.

Harry jolted and reached out his hands as if he wanted to stop her, but the fall wasn’t very long, and Christine just dropped on the grass, walking the pathway Zayn had walked as well a thousand times with his patients while talking to them.

She reached the fence, and there was a small gap in it, a gap she pushed at, sliding through it until she was really outside.

“How the fuck did no one notice she was going outside every night?” Zayn muttered.

Elliot chuckled bitterly. “Doctor Malik, no one except you three and Niall and Liam gives a shit about us. The night nurses spend their time in the cafeteria unless someone screams very loud. Christine and I went out together a shitton of times, to have our picnics on the yard under the moon. She brought crackers, and she smiled whenever I managed to eat one without throwing it up. No one ever noticed. Christine was always quiet” he said.

Zayn felt something sad howl behind his ribcage. How many lives had been ruined because of those fucking pills?

Christine was proceeding to a box by a tree at the beginning of the woods, and when she opened it, three black cats were inside of it. Zayn thought they were cute, and then he almost threw up.

Christine had a small knife with her. She picked up the first cat, and she started cutting off its fingers, one by one, while the poor animal hissed and shrieked in pain.

She did the same to all three of them, before cutting their throats.

Harry was heaving by the time Christine was done and she was making her way back to the hospital. Zayn pushed down his own nausea and leaned over Harry, stroking his back in gentle circles.

“That’s what she did to herself that’s how she died that’s how she killed herself” Harry was murmuring “What did they make her do why why why my poor Christine she was so good so gentle so kind oh my God Zayn they turned her into a monster”

“Yeah, doc, they did” Elliot said “And you found out. You watched this tape the night before she died. And you told me you were gonna tell Niall and Liam. I take it you did, and Barlow and Winston noticed, so they got rid of you by making you crazy and using the trauma for Christine’s suicide as an excuse”

Harry nodded, stroking his face with his palms. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. They gave us meds to confuse us, and the meds made us into whatever mental illness was closer to our normal behaviour” he said “I was lying, so they made me lie pathologically. I never _made up_ things, did I? I lied, but I only took things other people told me and said them as they were mine. Liam could have some mean mood swings, so I think they could have made him bipolar. Niall was always so fucking happy, so they probably made him a schizo” he turned to Zayn with big eyes “Are Niall and Liam diagnosed with bipolarism and schizophrenia, Zayn?”

Zayn was gaping at Harry, partly because he’d solved the mystery so quickly, and partly because he’d indeed never known the diagnoses for Niall and Liam, but he’d figured them out in a moment as well. “Yeah” he confirmed “Yeah, babe, that’s what they made them”

“Fuck” Harry buried his face in his hands and didn’t speak for a while. Then he raised his head and looked at Elliot. “Elliot? How do you know what happened to Christine? I’m sure that even if I really was insane I’d never let you watch this whole thing with me. I might have showed you the scene where Christine speaks Danish, but I don’t think I would ever have showed you the rest”

Elliot sighed. “You didn’t. I asked you to. You said no. But, doctor Styles… Christine was slowly remembering her nights outside. She told me herself. That’s what went wrong with her. She remembered, and it fucked her up beyond remedy”

Harry audibly gulped down, and drove his fingers through his hair. “What are we gonna do?”

Louis stood up, and when Zayn looked at him, his eyes were sending daggers. “You’re gonna calm the fuck down, first of all, Haz” he said “I’ll tell you what we’ll do then. We’re gonna take Niall and Liam, and we’re gonna get the fuck out of here” he turned to Elliot “And you’re coming with us, kid. Barlow’s gonna take three seconds to realize you’re involved if the five of us vanish into thin air”

“What?” Harry hissed “Louis, Niall and Liam are still under those fucking meds. We cannot take ‘em out of here, they’re never gonna be quiet enough!”

But Louis was right. There was no way they could stay in the hospital now that the truth was out. Zayn stood up too. “We have to risk it, Harry. It’s even more dangerous if we stay”

Elliot sighed. “You go grab Liam and Niall. I’ll start doctor Malik’s jeep”

Harry squealed. “You _drive_?”

Elliot shrugged. “I don’t have a license, but I can drive. And don’t look at me like that. Ben fucking Winston has a license and _that one_ doesn’t mean shit”

Louis chuckled. “Well played, kid”

“I preferred when you were a mute” Zayn offered, the thought about how fucking _illegal_ everything in his life had become making his head spin.

“Tough luck, doctor Malik” Elliot stated, opening the window and sitting on the sill “Christine always said I talked too fucking much” he winked, and jumped off.

“What’s with these kids and jumping off windows?” Harry muttered.

“We jumped off the fucking roof of our flat three years ago for fun, Haz” Louis offered.

Zayn snorted. “A great example for the kids”

Harry shoved at his shoulder. “Shut up, Zayn. Let’s go get our friends. If Niall wakes the whole building up, then you fucking _run_ ”

 

*

 

Elliot had been right about the night nurses, Zayn thought, because it was true they certainly weren’t roaming the corridors as Zayn would have expected. It was a good thing, though, since he was at the end of the hallway with Harry, in the semi-darkness, waiting for Louis to come back with Niall and Liam. Louis had said it was better if he went to take the two of them alone, and Zayn had agreed, because both Liam and Niall seemed to be perfectly at ease with Louis, and God knew they needed them to be _quiet_.

“I think Louis stopped giving Niall and Liam the meds too” Harry told Zayn, kicking the floor with the tip of his string-less sneakers.

Zayn jolted his head up. “What?”

Harry nodded. “I think so. At least for the past two days. I don’t hear them scream anymore” he explained, and sighed when he probably noticed Zayn’s irritated expression “Don’t be mad he didn’t tell you, Zayn. Could you honestly expect anything different? He loves them. It wasn’t fair, that I got to go back to being myself, and they couldn’t”

“Harry, do you fucking understand that _this_ is the reason Barlow noticed I wasn’t giving you the meds?” Zayn hissed, although he wanted to shout “He noticed _they_ were different, and he understood Louis and I are doing something with the three of you”

Harry shrugged. “I don’t care, Zayn. They’re my friends”

“ _I_ care, Harry. I care ‘cause if he managed to give you the fucking pills again, I would have lost you”

Harry’s eyes widened and he opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, but then he didn’t reply. He just gasped and looked back to the hallway. When he followed Harry’s gaze, Zayn saw Louis coming towards them with Niall and Liam.

 _He hasn’t seen them for months_ , Zayn reminded himself as Harry’s beautiful eyes watered.

Harry didn’t give any warning before he started running towards them, and he was so quick Zayn didn’t have any time to stop him. It wasn’t necessary, though, because when he flung himself on them, they only hugged him back, hushed whispers of “Haz” and “Ni” and “Leeyum” and “Fuck I missed you” filling the small hallway of the LTCS ward.

 _None of them ever looked like they were really crazy_ , Zayn thought as he looked at the three of them pull Louis into their hug as well. Zayn smiled, and gave them another moment before reluctantly having to interrupt the reunion with a small cough.

Niall pointed his blue eyes on him and frowned. “Doctor Malik? What’s he doing here? Is he gonna bring us back?” he asked Louis.

Louis patted him on the shoulder. “No, Niall. Zayn’s the reason I was able to come get you at last”

Niall nodded, his shoulders relaxing.

Liam nodded as well. “Okay, cool. Would have been a shame if you were one of the bad ones, doctor Malik. A total waste of eyelashes and cheekbones on a villain” he said.

Harry whipped his head towards him and gave him a glare with his eyes in slits. “Hands off” he hissed to Liam.

Liam arched his eyebrow at him. “Um, Haz? You okay?”

“ _What the fuck are you doing?_ ” someone hissed behind their backs.

Zayn turned around so quickly his head spun, his heart jumping in his throat at the thought they’d been discovered before they even tried to get out of the hospital, but he heaved a sigh of relief when he saw it was just Elliot, sticking his head through the window by the stairs. “You gotta get the fuck out _now_ ” the kid hissed at them “I just saw two nurses go out the back to smoke. We gotta go before they decide to take a walk around the building and they see us” he told them, and then was gone again.

“Fuck” Louis hissed “C’mon, c’mon, let’s go”

As they quickly and silently went down the stairs and jumped out of the window Christine had used to get away once, Zayn observed Niall and Liam, and thought Harry had been right. There would have been no way for them to keep them so quiet and vigilant if Louis hadn’t stopped giving them the meds. And maybe Harry was right on the rest as well, maybe Zayn had gotten angry at Louis not telling him, but as Zayn watched Louis take care that all his friends jumped off the window safely, and guided them all along the iron fence of the institute so that they would be in the darkness and not noticeable, he also thought Louis had surely felt like he had no other choice, and he couldn’t blame him.

Harry’s hand snaked into Zayn’s as they slowly slid through the shadows of the willow trees of the yard, going for Zayn’s jeep, in which Elliot was waiting for them, the engine already running and the lights turned off. Zayn thanked God for Elliot’s presence of mind, because Zayn had parked the car right at the entrance of the hospital when he’d gotten there, but the kid had moved it behind the trees, so there was a chance no one would see it and they would just assume Zayn had gone home after calming Harry down.

 _Please please don’t go check on any of them tonight_ , Zayn prayed.

They sprinted for the car and quickly opened the doors to get in, Zayn climbing in the passenger seat while the others scrambled on the backseat, Harry probably elbowing everyone in the ribs while they tried to squeeze in, if the muffled hurt noises were anything to go by.

Elliot barely waited for them to close the doors, and drove off.

Zayn took a relieved breath only when they were far enough from the hospital, halfway to Zayn’s place for which Zayn was giving Elliot directions, hoping no police was around to stop them and ask Elliot for his driving license, because there had been no time for them to pull over and exchange seats. Getting as far away from the hospital as possible came first, and Zayn had decided it was safer to go to his place, because Louis and Harry’s and Liam and Niall’s places would be the first to be searched once they figured out they were gone.

“Christine would have loved this” Elliot murmured while swiftly taking a right turn once Zayn pointed it for him “The breaking you out of the asylum and me being the designated driver”

Harry chuckled, his big hand patting Elliot on the shoulder from the backseat. “We’re gonna give her justice, Elliot, I promise”

Elliot nodded. “Her, and you, and Niall and Liam. They gotta pay for making you crazy”

Liam laughed. “I still feel kinda out of it to be honest” he admitted “But at least I know now”

Niall barked his usual laugh. “Right? It’s like I feel a bit whacky, but I am deciding not to bang my head in the window at the moment”

Zayn raised his eyes toward the ceiling of the car, fervently praying _none_ of them lost their shit anytime soon. “Allah, keep them sane at least until we get to my place” he mouthed.

Elliot laughed. “Already regretting saving your boyfriend, doc?”

Harry squealed from the backseat, but didn’t offer anything more interesting to the conversation.

Zayn felt his cheeks burn and kept his eyes on the road, ignoring Elliot’s shit-eating grin. “Watch out for the speed-limit, I don’t have money to bail your arse out of jail, since I think I just _lost_ my fucking job” he muttered.

Elliot laughed again. “For being a shrink, doc, you’re really fucking easy to read”

 

*

 

Zayn frantically bolted the door of his house with all four turns of the key as soon as they were all safely inside, while Elliot took care of lowering the blinds of all the windows in the living room.

When Zayn turned to look at the five people behind him, he found various grades of worry and sadness and excitement in their eyes, but his gaze stopped on Harry.

Harry, lovely Harry with big green eyes and messy curls, staring back at him like he hung the stars and moon.

“You all need to rest” Zayn decided “I’ll make up the guest rooms, you’re lucky I have two of ‘em ‘cause my family is huge”

Niall chuckled. “Doctor Malik, after sleeping four months in a steel room, I think even your floor would feel like a heavenly fucking cloud to me”

“Zayn” Zayn replied “I’m not your doctor anymore. I frankly think I won’t be anyone’s doctor after this shitshow ends”

Harry sent a worried glance his way, but Zayn just tried to smile his most reassuring I’m Your Shrink And You Can Trust Me smile, and gestured for them to follow him upstairs.

He quickly took care of setting clean sheets on the two beds in the guest rooms while Elliot helped him and Harry tried to help too, ending up being more in the way than actually helpful, but Zayn didn’t mind. He could understand Harry’s need to _do_ something, when he hadn’t been able to do shit in the last four months.

When the beds were ready, he noticed Liam and Louis a bit further away in the corridor, whispering things to each other with their foreheads touching and their hands cupping each other’s face, and he smiled a little, glad that at least Liam remembered Louis now, _really_ remembered.

“Doctor Styles?” Elliot murmured while Zayn rummaged through his closet, looking for sweatpants and t-shirts for everyone.

“Yeah, Elliot?” Harry replied, a clear smile in his tone even if Zayn wasn’t looking at him, because the fact that Harry was in his house, sitting on his bed, felt quite a bit overwhelming.

“Doctor Malik was right. I did stop speaking on purpose so I could stay in the hospital after they locked you up. I’m sorry I didn’t do anything”

“Oh, Elliot, but you did” Harry slowly said “You helped me before I lost my mind. And you helped Zayn and Louis and me figure it out when I forgot. And you drove us. Besides, I know myself, and I’m pretty sure I told you not to do anything until I came to you with the code we agreed on”

Elliot emitted a small, bitter chuckle. “Yeah. You’re right. But still. I’ve known all this time, that they did something to you and Liam and Niall. I was just too scared. And I didn’t know who to trust. Not even doctor Malik. I felt he was a good one, but I couldn’t be sure”

“Why did you feel he was a good one?”

Elliot shrugged. “He listens to Usher in his office while he works. I like Usher. He has his sides shaved and his hair in a topknot and that makes for sick cartoons, same as you with the curls. And he’s got really cool tattoos”

Zayn couldn’t hold back a chuckle at that. “Cheers, kid. Your tattoos are cool as well” he offered, looking at the sleeve of ink Elliot had on his left arm, lines and lines of mandalas and runes and geometric figures and a flower on the inside of his bicep.

Elliot lovingly brushed his fingers on the flower. “Christine drew this one. She said my tattoos were too angsty, and I needed something delicate to balance them”

Harry sighed and the corner of his mouth rose up in a small smile. “She drew a tattoo for me as well. Didn’t have time to ink it before they interned me. It was a flower as well”

Elliot nodded. “I know. We planned it together. Four petals, for you and your closest friends. Christine said me and her could be the stem and the leaf on it, but she didn’t tell you that ‘cause we both thought it was too fucking sappy even for us”

Zayn felt sadness creep its way through his heart at the thought that Harry had been robbed of the possibility of helping that girl, a girl who should have been healed and happy out of that clinic months earlier, if someone else hadn’t decided to experiment on her fucking disease.

Harry bit down on his bottom lip for a moment, exchanging a brief glance with Zayn, and then patted Elliot on the shoulder. “We should sleep this whole day off, kid. And tomorrow we can try to find a way to bring Christine the justice she deserves”

Elliot nodded and stood up from Zayn’s bed. “I think getting all of you out of there is already justice enough. But I won’t complain if I live to see Barlow and Winston go to jail for the rest of their life” he said, and then waved them goodnight and retreated to the first guest room, which he was probably going to share with Niall, because Louis and Liam hadn’t looked like they were done talking, and they surely needed the privacy they hadn’t had for months.

As soon as they all said goodnight and Zayn and Harry were left alone in Zayn’s bedroom, with the door finally closed, it was like the two of them moved both in slow motion and at the fastest pace possible.

They met in the middle of the room, Zayn’s hand going to cup Harry’s jaw, and the moment later they were kissing.

Harry tasted like cheap toothpaste and something Zayn had never tasted, like _himself, Harry Harry Harry._ His tongue was shy and tentative in Zayn’s mouth, like Harry had forgotten how to kiss, but to Zayn it felt like the best kiss he’d ever experienced, because he’d desperately dreamt about being able to kiss Harry for weeks, and they’d been the only pleasant dreams he’d had in a long while.

His hands slid through Harry’s curls like he’d wished he could do at least a thousand times, and he took control of the kiss, slowly pushing his own tongue against Harry’s, through Harry’s parted lips, their noses bumping together and their bodies getting impossibly closer.

“You need to sleep” Harry managed to breathe on Zayn’s lips after a while “You need to sleep, you never sleep okay, I know, I see it, I specialized in sleep disorders, you can fool everyone and even yourself but you can’t fool me”

Zayn, despite his impending arousal, had to stop the kiss and smile fondly at that. “I don’t wanna fool anyone, Harry. I know my sleep has always been fucked, I won’t pretend like it isn’t. But I honestly don’t care about sleeping now that I finally have you in another place, another time”

The smile Harry gave him after he said that was so blinding Zayn had to close his eyes for a moment. Harry was the one kissing him first then, backing Zayn towards the bed until he hit it with the back of his knees, falling down and pulling Harry down with him.

Their legs slotted together, and Zayn roamed his hands up and down Harry’s broad back, the back Zay had always tried to ignore whenever Harry flexed his shoulders, stretching the thin hospital t-shirt with his muscles.

Harry latched his lips to Zayn’s neck, and simultaneously reached for the hem of Zayn’s shirt, starting to lift it up. “Off, off, I need this off” he breathed.

It took all of Zayn’s self-control to grab Harry’s wrists and stop him. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want, Harry, babe, you’ve just…”

“Just what, Zayn?” Harry interrupted him, voice hoarse “Just gotten out of the loony bin? Just become sane again? Because I can assure you, in whatever circumstance we would have met, there was no way I couldn’t want this” he placed a hand on Zayn’s chest “So I want it. If you want it as well”

Zayn nodded. Slowly at first, then more vigorously when he realized Harry was still staring at him, still trying to figure out if Zayn wanted him just as much as he wanted Zayn. And how could Zayn _possibly_ not want him, when he was so gorgeous, so kind, so perfect, had been since the first time they spoke, when all the odds were against it and Harry should have been just another mentally ill patient to him? He never had been, never, _never._

“How do you want it?” Zayn murmured, tilting his head down to catch Harry’s lips in another kiss.

“I want you to fuck me” Harry breathed, and Zayn nodded again.

They were naked before Zayn could even realize they’d started removing each other’s clothes, and Zayn had to switch their positions, because Harry had tattoos, and he needed to have him underneath him so Zayn could watch him, impress every nook and cranny of his body behind his eyelids, so that Harry would be the only thing he ever saw, the only thing he would dream of, so that all his nights from now on would be filled with Harry, and all the other dreams would cease to exist.

Zayn traced the tip of his tongue along the wings of the swallows tattooed on Harry’s collarbones, and Harry breathed a moan, driving his long fingers through Zayn’s hair as Zayn’s mouth went lower, lower, to the moth in the middle of his stomach, a stupid fucking moth that Harry pulled off so effortlessly Zayn wanted to eat him whole.

Harry was hard, just as hard as Zayn himself was, and God, he was a leaker. Zayn didn’t give him any warning before closing his mouth around the tip of his dick, licking the precome there and swallowing around it, making Harry bring his own hand to his mouth to muffle the moan that threatened to come out.

Zayn smiled at Harry’s presence of mind about the other guests in the house, but kept inching his mouth further on Harry, until he felt him hit the back of his throat, lightly stimulating his gag reflex. He didn’t care, and swallowed around Harry’s dick a couple of times before Harry started to pant and try to buck his hips. Zayn let him, let Harry fuck his mouth because he wanted him to and because Harry was so needy and lost in it that Zayn would do anything to keep him being like that.

“Zayn, stop, babe, I’m gonna come, I need you inside me” Harry muttered, eyes fluttering close, and Zayn obeyed, because he was so hard it hurt. He released Harry from his mouth with a sound so obscene it made Harry’s cheeks go a dark shade of red, and he chuckled, straddling Harry’s hips and leaning into the bedside table to retrieve a condom and the lube he kept there.

Harry watched him with dark eyes as he covered his fingers in lube and circled one of them around Harry’s rim, slowly pushing in. Harry’s back arched off the mattress at the intrusion, but he nodded and whispered Zayn’s name over and over, until Zayn had three fingers in him and was stretching them carefully, trying to ignore how hard he’d become just by opening Harry up for him.

He bent his fingers inside of Harry, and Harry’s eyes squeezed shut as he lifted his head to bite at Zayn’s shoulder to muffle his noises. Zayn kept lightly brushing Harry’s prostate over and over again until he could see tears of pleasure in Harry’s eyes, and he decided they both had had enough of that.

Harry frantically helped him roll on the condom, and although he chuckled at his impatience, he stopped laughing when he started breaching Harry’s hole, because he was tight, so fucking tight and hot and perfect.

“Fuck, babe” Zayn muttered with his lips on Harry’s “So good”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, yeah, babe, Zayn, fuck me, I need you to move and fuck me” he demanded once Zayn had slowly and carefully bottomed out.

So Zayn did. He started to pull out almost to the tip and then slid back in, quickening his pace when Harry dug his nails into his shoulders and slipped his tongue in his mouth again, meeting his thrusts halfway with a grind of his hips.

“I’ve wanted you since I first saw you” Harry panted on Zayn’s lips “I even told you, but I didn’t know it was the truth until you saved me”

Zayn bit down on Harry’s lip. “I thought it was wrong, it wasn’t right, to want you this much. But there was nothing else I could feel since the moment I saw your eyes. Your eyes never lied to me, never”

Harry came. Just like that, his dick untouched, just at Zayn’s words. He tuned down his scream by pressing his lips to Zayn’s for the umpteenth time, and he painted both their stomachs with strings of come, clenching around Zayn so hard he could do nothing but follow him with his own orgasm.

Afterwards, after Zayn had cleaned them both with a damp towel from the bathroom, he felt his heart burst with happiness when Harry fell asleep curled around him, his arms around Zayn’s waist and his head on Zayn’s chest.

Zayn fell asleep very quickly, which was definitely thanks to Harry, because Zayn wasn’t exactly lucky with his sleep.

That, of course, didn’t mean Zayn didn’t have any nightmares.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am being way too quick with this, but I firmly don't believe in the whole 'one chapter per week' thing. I hope you don't mind.  
> Just one more chapter to go!  
> As usual, kudos and comments are appreciated :)


	5. Truths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Operation Mad Shrink is a go” Elliot stated.  
> Zayn rolled his eyes. “Operation Mad Shrink? Really?”  
> Elliot shrugged. “It is about shrinks and they’re batshit. Now, let’s revise the plan one more time” he ordered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: The plot of this story revolves around mental illnesses. Reader discretion is advised. If you think you might be sensitive about the themes listed in the tags, please please please do not read this story.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't know or own any of the characters. I only own the plot and the original characters.

 

 

 

The dream starts like any other dream Zayn has had for the past month.

He’s barely fourteen, young and fucked in the head, in the steel room where the doctor placed him when he started hallucinating. Zayn hates the room.

“What do the monsters look like, Zayn?” the doctor asks from his chair.

“Like animals. Big animals with claws and teeth” Zayn answers “They make me do stuff”

“What stuff?”

Zayn shrugs. “I don’t remember. They tell me to go fetch things for them. Stupid things. Spoons and forks and books”

“What kind of books do you like?”

“I like comics. And don’t say they’re not books”

The doctor smiles. “I just finished reading my favourite book again. _Catcher in the rye_ , have you read it? I hear it’s mandatory in most schools”

Zayn shakes his head. “I haven’t been in school for almost a year, doc”

“I think there’s a copy in the open unit. You should read it, it’s really good”

Zayn shrugs, and the doctor smiles again, noting something down on his notepad. Do doctors always have to write things down, like Zayn is a caged animal whose behaviour they need to keep track of?

The door explodes. Or, well, it doesn’t really explode, but it opens, violently.

It’s the new doctor, the older one who came from abroad. Cowell is his name, Zayn thinks. He’s cool. Always kinda mean to the nurses, but he’s nice to Zayn. “I need to talk to you. Now” Cowell tells the doctor.

“I’m in the middle of a session” the doctor says coldly.

“I don’t fucking care. Come out. Now” Cowell says sternly.

The doctor sighs and smiles at Zayn before standing up and following Cowell outside, closing Zayn’s door behind them.

The peephole is open. The doctor forgot to close it. And well, Zayn might be a nutcase now, but he’s always been a curious person. Curiosity killed the cat, his mum always says. Might as well kill the fucking cat, Zayn thinks, and silently reaches the door, listening.

“What the fuck are you doing with that kid?” Cowell is hissing. He’s angry.

The doctor sighs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about”

“He’s sleepwalking! This shouldn’t happen. I saw him. Why isn’t this reported in his folder?”

“Cowell, Zayn is my patient, not yours. Mind your own business”

“No, I won’t. Something’s wrong with that kid, and it’s not the insomnia. He should be better, but he isn’t. What meds are you giving him?”

The doctor doesn’t answer.

“Let me see the stash of meds. Now” Cowell demands.

“You should walk away now, Cowell, and forget this whole conversation. It’s for your own good”

Cowell laughs. “Are you threatening me right now, kid? I _own_ this clinic. And if you don’t tell me right now what kind of pills you’re giving Zayn Malik, I swear to God you can kiss your brand new license goodbye, Benjamin Winston”

Zayn wakes up screaming.

 

*

 

“Zayn! Zayn! Zayn, wake up!”

The voice pulled Zayn out of the dream – the nightmare, the _memory_ – like something physical hooked in his guts, pulling and tearing.

Zayn gasped for air, feeling hands on his shoulders, his arms, his chest. Harry.

Green eyes were staring at him with worry as Zayn felt his own throat hurt and sat up, panting, desperately looking for air.

_Benjamin Winston. Benjamin Winston. Benjamin Winston is the name of my old doctor, the name I couldn’t remember, the name that looked familiar._

“Ben Winston” Zayn found out he was saying out loud “Ben Winston was my doctor, the one who made me get worse before Cowell stepped in and healed me, I was an insomniac and I sleepwalked and Ben Winston was my doctor”

“Zayn!” Harry’s hands grabbed him by the shoulders and lightly pressed, grounding Zayn, tethering him to the bed “Zayn, you have to calm down, I don’t understand a word you’re saying!”

“ _Ben Winston_ , Harry!” Zayn screamed “I was an insomniac, you know that! I had a psychiatrist treat me for a long time, and he made me _get worse_! I was _sleepwalking_!”

The door of the room banged open, and Louis stepped in, worry clouding his blue eyes as he reached Harry and Zayn with everyone else in tow. “Zayn? Are you okay? We heard you scream”

Zayn stared at them all, but just for a moment. Then he scrambled out of the bed and frantically turned on his laptop, opening the folder that had been hidden and secured in the deepest corner of his archive, the folder he hadn’t opened in years, the folder labelled ‘Zayn Javadd Malik – Insomniac’.

He opened it, and looked for the beginning of his clinical history while the rest of the people in the room stared at him in silence. And when the file opened, there it was, the name Zayn had forgotten, the name that seemed to have vanished from Zayn’s mind, and Zayn had always written it off as a consequence of his insomnia, the fact that he didn’t remember a fuckton of things from when he was interned. The things from before Cowell stepped in out of nowhere and _fixed_ Zayn for good.

_Zayn Javadd Malik, 14. Diagnosis: chronic insomnia. Followed and treated by: doc. Benjamin Winston._

There was even a picture of Zayn, cheeks hollow and eyes hollower, and next to it, a picture of his psychiatrist. The stubble growing on his face, the light brown eyes, the high forehead.

“Is this Ben?” Zayn asked everyone, showing them his laptop “Is this _that_ Ben Winston?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, Zayn, that’s Ben”

“Fuck” Zayn hissed, sitting on the edge of the bed and pushing the laptop as far away from himself as he could “Ben was my doctor when I was interned”

“You were what?” Louis asked, in the soothing tone he used with the patients who didn’t want to take their meds.

Zayn nodded, pressing the tips of his fingers to his eyes, and feeling the mattress shift as the rest of them sat down on it, behind him, waiting for him to elaborate.

He took a deep breath and turned around to face them. “I was interned as a chronic insomniac, back in my hometown. When I was fourteen. My psychiatrist was Ben, but I forgot his name until right the fuck now. I forgot a shitton of things ‘cause of my insomnia, so I didn’t think much of it. I’m good now. Mostly. I still sleep like shit, but I’m healed. I wouldn’t have gotten my license if I wasn’t. You know, Harry. You specialized in sleep disorders”

Zayn looked at Harry, and he probably didn’t look much like a licensed psychiatrist in that moment, but Harry slowly nodded with a small smile. “Yeah, babe. I know you sleep like shit. But I also know you’re fine”

Zayn nodded back. “The thing is, my sleep got more fucked when I started working at the hospital. I started dreaming about when I was interned. I thought it was stress, but it wasn’t. It was _Ben_. I read his name everywhere, and it sounded so fucking familiar. I didn’t remember, but my dreams tried to make me. Only I’ve never seen a picture of Ben, so I didn’t make the connection” he took a ragged breath “But this is not important now. What’s important is that I was Ben’s patient, and he gave me pills. He made me sleepwalk. Jesus, what if… what if…” Zayn didn’t even know how to say it.

Harry’s hand grabbed his shoulder at the same moment in which Louis’s hand went for Zayn’s arm. “He didn’t make you do what they made Christine do” Harry said resolutely.

“How can we be _sure_ , Harry? I don’t fucking remember!”

Harry shook his head. “He didn’t, ‘cause someone intervened. You’re healed, you’re fine. That means someone stopped Ben”

Harry was right, Zayn thought as his mind went a mile a minute. “You’re right. You’re right. Cowell. Cowell owned the hospital I was in, and he came back from abroad. He thought something was off with my meds. He confronted Ben about it. I don’t know what happened next. But Ben went away, and Cowell treated me. It took him four years. But he fixed me”

Nobody said anything after that, but Zayn didn’t mind, because he didn’t know what to say either. He just looked for his phone on his nightstand. It was six in the morning.

His eyes were drooping after he’d let out his fear and worry, but he needed to stay awake, he needed to do something. “I need coffee” he said, and it sounded so weird and crazy that after all he’d remembered, coffee was the thing he needed first. But it was. He needed to be _awake_.

Elliot, wonderful Elliot who was also healed but he’d faked mutism so that he could stay and help, sighed and stood up. “I’ll make you coffee, doc” he said “I know you’re useless without your coffee”

Zayn frowned and looked at him. “How do you know?”

Elliot shrugged. “You always come to the hospital with a travel mug of coffee. I might have been mute, but I wasn’t blind. I looked at you. Needed to be sure you were good” he offered “So now I’ll make you coffee. And then you gotta call this Cowell doctor, so you can figure this shit out before anyone realizes the mute kid, the nurse, the psychiatrist _and_ the whole psycho ward have gone AWOL”

 

*

 

Zayn drank an exceptionally strong coffee made by Elliot in his own kitchen, and when he felt more present and vigilant, half an hour later, he dialled Cowell’s number, putting the call on speaker and hoping the psychiatrist would answer.

“Hello?” came the voice from the other side of the phone.

Zayn sighed in relief. “Doctor Cowell? Hi. It’s Zayn. Zayn Malik”

Cowell laughed. “Zayn! It’s been a long time, kid”

“Not a kid” Zayn muttered, and Elliot snorted “How… how are you, doc?”

Cowell hummed. “We might as well skip the pleasantries, kid, and you can tell me why you sound so dismayed and decided it was a good idea to call me at this ungodly hour”

Zayn winced a bit, because it was six thirty in the bloody morning, but he needed the answers. “Sorry about this, doc. But I need some answers. About Ben Winston”

Cowell was silent for a couple seconds before replying. “What about Winston?”

“He was the psychiatrist who followed me before you, wasn’t he? I forgot his name. I just remembered”

“Yeah” Cowell replied “What do you need to know?”

Zayn needed a cigarette. He reached for the packet on his breakfast bar, and lighted one right in the middle of his kitchen, not bothering to think about how he’d promised himself to never smoke inside the house so that the smell wouldn’t stick to his curtains and give Trisha Malik an aneurysm.

“What did he do to me?” Zayn asked Cowell “What did you find out? Why did he leave?”

Cowell sighed. “I’m actually not quite sure, Zayn. I only know he fucked up big time with you, didn’t even give you the right diagnosis. Your insomnia wasn’t chronic, you weren’t beyond help. You were even getting better when I came back to England and to the hospital. Then, suddenly, you were getting worse, and I had the night shift, I saw you sleepwalking. It wasn’t right, it shouldn’t happen, so I got suspicious and I looked into your folder. The sleepwalking wasn’t even recorded, and there was no info about the meds you were taking”

Harry sighed and held his own temples with the tips of his fingers, lightly shaking his head. Zayn took a drag from his cigarette. “What did you do?” he asked.

“I’m not proud of it, and I take full responsibility for breaching protocol. I recorded you” Cowell said “For three nights in a row, without telling Ben. You stood up from your bed, and roamed the hospital. You went to the kitchen, took cutlery from the drawers and brought them in Ben’s office. Then it landed on me. Ben would slip something about spoons in your conversations, and in the night you would take spoons from the kitchen. Or he would speak about a certain book to you, and in the night you would take the book from the shelves in the open unit and would bring it to his office”

_Catcher in the rye, have you read it? I think there’s a copy in the open unit. You should read it, it’s really good._

“They were fucking _training_ you” Harry hissed “Experimenting. Seeing what they could make you do in your sleep”

“Who’s that?” Cowell asked.

Zayn sighed, feeling his heart hammer painfully in his chest. “His name’s Harry, doc. Harry Styles. He’s a psychiatrist at the hospital where I work”

Zayn didn’t miss the small smile on Harry’s face when he noticed Zayn had used the present tense to talk about his job, but Zayn owed at least that to Harry. Cowell hummed, impressed. “Harry Edward Styles. Most promising psychiatrist in the country I’m told. Your PhD dissertation was brilliant. Your research helped me a lot with my own patients”

Harry’s cheeks reddened, and he stuttered a bit. “Um, thank you, doctor Cowell”

“What’s this really about, Zayn?” Cowell asked, his tone suddenly more serious.

Zayn stubbed his cigarette and tried to light another one, but Harry stopped him with a frown. Zayn rolled his eyes and let the cigarette go. “Ben was working in my hospital before I was hired, and…”

“ _What_?” Cowell hissed “ _What the fuck_?”

Zayn gulped down. “Doc?”

“Ben fucking Winston _can’t work anymore_ , Zayn. I didn’t manage to actually find out what he was doing to you, what those meds actually were. But he fucked you up on purpose. I reported him to the Medical Council. They revoked his license more than ten years ago”

Louis gripped his glass of water so hard Zayn was afraid he’d break it. “Well, fucking Ben was in the hospital pretending he was a brand new licensed psychiatrist, and shadowing Harry, until he fucked everything up”

Cowell hummed again. “I understand we have an audience. Well, no matter. Zayn, I demand you tell me exactly what the problem here is”

So Zayn did. He concisely told Cowell about Christine, about what Harry and Niall and Liam had found out, about what Ben had done to them afterwards. About how Ben had subsequently abandoned the hospital for some reason, and how Barlow had kept making sure Harry, Niall and Liam remained crazy and forgetful to cover up what had happened to Christine.

“Wait wait wait” Cowell said urgently “The hospital is St. Thomas? Are you talking about Henry fucking Barlow?”

Zayn’s heart started to beat in his temples. “Yeah. Why?”

Cowell let out a swear so articulated it made even Louis blush a little, and Elliot cramp his mouth shut with his hands to avoid laughing hysterically. Zayn shared the sentiment. “I was there” Cowell said “I was there, less than two months ago, for the yearly inspection the Medical Council conducts in every private clinic in the country. I reckon that is the reason Ben had to stop officially working at St. Thomas. Because if I ever found out he did, he would be in jail by now”

“And good riddance” Niall muttered.

“And Zayn? Do you know why Barlow might have had the money to become the director of a mental institution, but could never be an actual doctor?” Cowell asked grimly.

“No?” Zayn offered, his voice coming out all wrong.

“Well, I do know, and I’ll tell you, because I’ve known Henry Barlow since we both were in med school” Cowell said “He never got his psychiatric license. The board didn’t deem him fit to practise the profession, because he had some _interesting_ opinions about a certain kind of medication, and by ‘interesting’ I mean batshit crazy”

Harry leaned over the phone. “What do you mean, doctor Cowell? What opinions? What meds?” he asked, his words rushing.

“You should know better than all of us, doctor Styles, since you dedicated half of your brilliant PhD dissertation to list all the reasons those kinds of meds were indeed a batshit crazy idea”

“The sleepwalking pills. The ones to control insomnia” Harry said, unnecessarily at that point.

Cowell hummed affirmatively. “Exactly. Barlow explicitly told the whole fucking committee that he thought it would be amazing to produce those kinds of meds and feed them to the patients diagnosed with insomnia, because if they worked, the country could produce them as a chemical weapon and sell them”

“What the _everloving fuck_ ” Elliot hissed. Liam patted him on the shoulder and tried to smile reassuringly at him, failing miserably.

“Zayn, this is bad” Cowell said “If you’re certain that Ben is working with Barlow, then this can mean they’ve been using the pills all this time. They had that poor girl die over it. And it also means Ben tried to do the same to you, years ago, only I was luckily able to stop him in time”

Zayn nodded, feeling his breath come out shakily. “Yeah. Yeah. They did this to Christine. Then something went very fucking wrong, and she killed herself instead of the animals”

Elliot closed his eyes with a pained sigh, and leaned more into Liam, resting his forehead on Liam’s shoulder. Liam soothingly stroked his back in slow circles, sighing as well.

Harry’s hand slid into Zayn’s, and Zayn looked down at their entwined fingers. He briefly wondered how the fuck he’d survived that month before he knew how _right_ Harry’s hand in his felt.

“You have a video of Christine” Cowell mused after a moment “That’s evidence. We can pair it up with the recordings I have of you, Zayn, to back up our case. Barlow and Ben need to be reported. You need to stop them. You need to find them, and the pills, and we need to do _something_ ”

Zayn could see the excitement in the eyes of all the people surrounding him, the excitement that came with finally doing _something_. It wasn’t revenge, because they were lovely people and Zayn had never had doubts about _that_ from the start. It was justice, the justice they deserved, the justice Christine deserved, and hell, the justice even Zayn himself deserved at that point.

So Zayn nodded. “How do you advise me to proceed, doc?”

Cowell chuckled. “You don’t need my advice anymore, kid. You’re fine now, you know how to walk on your own legs. I’ll tell you what _I’ll_ do, though. I’ll start calling the police, the board, and the whole fucking Medical Council”

Zayn, despite it all, chuckled back, and agreed with Cowell. Authorities needed to be called.

As he hung up the call, though, he also agreed on the fact that they needed proof, actual proof, they needed the meds and they needed Barlow and Ben.

When he finally raised his head up and exchanged glances with Harry, Niall, Liam, and even Elliot, they all agreed on another thing.

They needed to go back to the hospital.

 

*

 

“Operation Mad Shrink is a go” Elliot stated when they were all ready to leave.

Zayn rolled his eyes. “Operation Mad Shrink? Really?”

Elliot shrugged. “It is about shrinks and they’re batshit. Now, let’s revise the plan one more time” he ordered.

Liam chuckled fondly. “You’re really invested in this, aren’t you?”

“Liam, my girlfriend died over this. Or, well, not my girlfriend. My probably future girlfriend, ‘cause she didn’t have time to explicitly confirm we were dating before they fucked her up” Elliot replied grimly, and no one commented on that “The plan. I want you to revise it. I need to make sure you all hold your scrambled wits for a while longer”

None of them commented on the fact that the kid was probably the sanest of them, either; Niall sighed and raised his hand. Elliot nodded gravely at him, and Niall started counting on his fingers.

“We all go back to the hospital. Zayn goes in alone, first. We hide in the jeep. Barlow usually comes to the hospital around eight thirty. It’s seven thirty now, so hopefully he won’t be around, and _assuming_ we’re _extremely_ lucky, which we never are but whatever, the night nurses kept doing a shitty job and they haven’t noticed we’re gone yet. Zayn goes, pretends like nothing happened for a while until he notices the patients are gone. Ruckus will ensue”

“We all sneak inside the hospital at that point” Liam continued “Elliot knows how not to be noticed, so we follow him. We crawl into the basement, because that’s where the meds probably are. They’re not in any accessible part of the hospital, so they have to be there. We look for them, we hopefully find them, we take them as evidence. We sneak back out. Meanwhile, Zayn corners Barlow. Barlow must not leave”

“I’ll lock him in his fucking office if all fails” Zayn promised “Once you get the meds and are _safely_ back into the car, you call Cowell. Tell him to send the police. And we all live happily ever fucking after. We’ll somehow take care of finding Ben afterwards”

Elliot nodded. “Cool. Look at you lot, all mentally healthy and remembering everything” he grinned “Man, Christine would have loved this” he added as they all got out of the house and in Zayn’s jeep, Zayn in the driving seat this time, and Harry next to him on the passenger seat.

Zayn heard the struggle on the backseat as four people tried to squeeze in, but he didn’t turn, because right that moment Harry’s hand found his.

Harry looked scared, and Zayn hated it, but he also knew he probably looked very scared himself.

Zayn drove off.

The ride to the hospital was completely silent, and Zayn did nothing to break the quiet. His mind was whirring, nerves tingling his limbs, making the fingers of his right hand drum on the steering wheel, while his left hand was still in Harry’s, sweaty and almost asleep, but he didn’t mind.

He parked the jeep behind the row of willow trees, and sighed, turning off the engine.

“Okay. I have my phone. Whatever happens, you call me, okay?” Zayn said, turning back to look at Louis in particular. Louis nodded.

Harry pulled Zayn to him without any warning, and kissed him. His tongue slipped in Zayn’s mouth, and Zayn parted his lips, not caring about the audience, because he needed that kiss just as much as Harry did, and because he didn’t want to think about the risk that that kiss could be their last, if all went south.

“Be careful” Harry whispered on his mouth, his forehead leaned into Zayn’s and his eyes closed “I would never forgive myself if something, anything, happened to you”

Zayn nodded, his nose stroking Harry’s in the movement. “I will. And, you too. I think I might die if you go back to a fucking steel room”

Harry chuckled, and nodded as well.

A fake gagging noise made them separate. Elliot was arching his eyebrows at them. “Very romantic, docs. But we have an asylum to tear apart”

“Psychiatric hospital” Zayn corrected before he could help it.

Elliot kept his eyebrows arched. “There’s literally a mad scientist feeding pills to people. This _is_ an asylum, doc”

“It stops today” Zayn said resolutely, and opened the door. He roughly kissed Harry again just because he could, and ran out of the car.

 _I should have taken a drama course in high school as well_ , he thought as he walked towards the building. _Too bad I never went to high school like a normal person ‘cause I was in the loony bin._

 

*

 

“Doctor Malik!” a dismayed nurse Madison attacked him as soon as he opened the doors “They’re gone! The patients in LTCS are gone! I was about to call you!”

 _Fuck fuck fuck._ “What?” he exclaimed, as shocked as he could.

She nodded, walking up the stairs with him. “Nurse Tomlinson is still not here for his shift, so I went to bring them their meds. I know I’m not Tomlinson, I know!” she assured quickly, scared Zayn would lash out at her like he’d done the day before “But Louis isn’t here. So I went. The rooms are empty, doctor Malik. They’re nowhere to be found. I don’t know what happened”

 _What happened is that luckily for us you’re very bad at your job._ “Are you still looking for them?”

Madison nodded. “Yes, yes, we’re searching the whole building up and down. They couldn’t go out of their rooms on their own, doctor. This is very weird”

Zayn saw the whole nursing squad going back and forth in the corridor, a sign that they were indeed looking for Harry, Niall and Liam. _Ruckus ensued alright, babes. Be quick and careful._

Zayn tried to look as aghast as nurse Madison was, and quickened his pace towards his office. “Find them. They can’t have wandered far without anyone _noticing_ , can they?” he said with an angry snap which Madison didn’t really deserve, except she totally did “I still need to take care of my other patients. I want to be updated every half an hour, am I clear?”

Nurse Madison nodded. “Yes, doctor. Mr. Barlow has also been informed. He called on doctor Winston, he used to work here before you. They’re looking as well”

 _What? No no no fuck fuck fuck._ “Where are they?” he asked, backing up inside the door of his office as inconspicuously as he could so that he could be less visible to anyone else in the corridor.

The nurse frowned. “They were right there two minutes ago” she said, pointing to the stairs “I think I heard them say something about the basement, said that they needed to check the meds were fine”

 _Fuck no no no no_. “Okay. Now go look for my patients, yeah?”

Nurse Madison nodded, and went away.

Zayn slammed his door shut and fumbled through his pockets for his phone, dialling Louis’s number as fast as he bloody could. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, answer the fucking phone, Louis”

“Hi, Louis speaking. I probably don’t wanna answer my phone, leave me a message if you think it’s important” Louis’s registered voice told him.

Zayn grunted and ended the call, shoving the phone back in his pocket. _What do I do what do I do._

He took a deep breath and looked around the office, thinking thinking thinking.

Zayn wondered why it took him so long to realize his desk was completely trashed, his notepads torn off and sheets scattered all around. Even his drawers had been fucked up, left open and empty, with the contents thrown on the floor. His office computer was turned on.

 _They know_ , he realized with bile rising up his throat.

He was running out of the office and down the stairs to the basement in less than a moment.

 

*

 

Once Zayn got to the entrance of the basement, he frantically swiped his key-card in the box and silently thanked God for the green light beeping and the door clicking open.

He pushed it, going past the threshold, and he immediately had an armful of Harry, crazy curls and big green eyes. He was shaking.

“Harry? Harry, are you okay?” he hissed. The lights in the corridor flashed intermittently.

Harry nodded. “I am, I am. Barlow and Ben caught us. They knew we were there. Louis shoved me behind an archive and told me to come get you. They didn’t see me”

“They’re with _them_?” Zayn almost shouted.

Harry agitatedly nodded again. “Yes, yes. We have to save them, Zayn. Ben said they were gonna kill Elliot and make you and Louis go crazy over it too”

Zayn grabbed Harry by the shoulders, scared of how wildly his eyes were moving. “Harry, Harry _focus_! Did Louis manage to call Cowell?”

Harry nodded. “Yes. We called him right before Barlow and Ben showed up”

Good, that was good, help was on the way. “Bring me to them, babe” Zayn said.

Harry took Zayn’s hand in a vice-like grip, and pulled them through the hallway, through a multitude of corridors that made Zayn’s head spin.

“I remember everything” Harry whispered “As soon as I saw Ben, I remembered. I confronted him in the afternoon, the day Christine died. I was so fucking stupid, Zayn, I told him everything I’d found out. I threatened him to report him to the Medical Council. He laughed, told me there was no way I would be able to do that after he’d be done with me. And then I was even _more_ fucking stupid, and I told him that whatever he’d do to me wouldn’t matter, because I already told Liam and Niall. It’s my fault. I was stupid, and Ben fucked us all up”

Zayn pulled Harry back, to look at him in the eyes. “Listen to me, Harry, okay? It _wasn’t_ your fault. You did the only thing you could do, you didn’t know how far Ben and Barlow would go to bury this whole thing. You weren’t stupid. I would have done the same, if I didn’t have you all as proof of how bad I could end up. It’s not your fault”

Harry sighed and slowly nodded, but didn’t answer. He just kept walking until they reached a completely dark small corridor, at the end of which Zayn could see lights flicker behind a semi-closed door, and he heard voices.

“You’re gonna go to fucking jail” Louis was saying “And I will fucking _laugh_ when they lock _you_ up”

A voice Zayn had heard every day for a year replied with a bitter laugh. “You really believe it, don’t you, Tomlinson? You’ve always been a fucking pain in the arse” Ben Winston said.

Zayn balled his fist as he and Harry carefully approached the door.

“It’s over, Ben” Niall said “We’re all good and mentally able now. The med board is gonna have both your heads for this”

“That’s what your clever friend doctor Styles said before we fried his brain” Barlow answered “It was a close call with him, wasn’t it. Always asking. Always roaming around the building looking for the fucking pills. A fucking nuisance, really. Too bad he always _lied_ ”

Zayn didn’t even try to stop Harry, because Harry didn’t give him the slightest warning before pushing the door open and standing in all his lanky glory, hands on his hips. “Well, Barlow, too bad I _never did_ ” he stated.

Barlow and Ben looked at Harry like they’d seen a ghost. “I _knew_ you had to be around somewhere. You never go far without your friends, do you?” Barlow told Harry.

Harry shrugged. “I’m here now. We’re all here, but you? Not for long, I’m afraid”

Zayn took a deep breath and entered the room as well, stopping right at Harry’s side. Niall, Liam, Louis and Elliot were with their backs against a wall, looking from Harry and Zayn to Ben and Barlow in the middle of the room, floor cluttered with old documents and folders and broken tables and chairs, chunks of dried wood scattered along tiles so old and dirty Zayn couldn’t see the original colour. _What kind of place is this?_

“The infamous doctor Malik who took my place” Ben chuckled “I thought it might be you, you know, Zayn? Not many people around with such a unique name. I’m surprised it took you this long to make the connection with _my_ name, though. You’ve always been kind of clever”

Zayn took a step forward. “I _forgot_! I forgot, ‘cause you fucked up my brain with your fucking meds, Ben!”

Ben sighed. “You were about to be my greatest accomplishment, until Cowell was suddenly glued at my fucking hip and reported me” he admitted “Well, it doesn’t matter now. We got lovely Christine afterwards. The meds worked on her. They _work_ ”

“They’re cooking the meds here” Liam told Zayn and Harry “Right here, under our fucking arses”

It was true. Zayn could see a clusterfuck of machines in a corner, too shiny and _new_ to be part of the old basement, and he could clearly make out some kind of dispenser, and boxes and boxes of tiny white pills, the pills that had fucked him and Christine up.

“They don’t _work_ ” Zayn coldly said “Christine died”

Barlow rolled his eyes. “Ah, well. A price someone had to pay. I don’t know what went wrong in that bitch’s brain at some point, we didn’t really expect her to kill _herself_ instead of the cats”

“WHAT WENT WRONG?” Elliot shouted, lurching forward, and Zayn flinched, but Louis was quick to hold the kid back “What went wrong was that she was _fine_ , and she rebelled to you even in her sleep! That’s why she killed herself! She couldn’t take it anymore, she’d started remembering what you made her do, and she _ended it of her own free will_!”

Ben curved his mouth in an impressed smile. “You became quite the shrink yourself, didn’t you, Elliot?”

“Fuck you, Ben. I never stood your ugly face” Elliot grunted “You killed my Christine. You fucked up my doctors. I fucking hate your guts”

Ben shrugged. “I think I’ll live” he said “Now. Where were we? Oh, yeah. This is the part where Elliot kills himself and you all lose your mind over it”

He barely took a step towards Elliot before sirens started blaring from the outside of the building.

 _Simon fucking Cowell, thank you thank you thank you_.

Zayn was too busy sighing in relief to notice the alarmed way in which Ben and Barlow looked at each other. He was too busy thinking everything was solved to see the knife in Ben’s hand.

Harry, clever lovely Harry, noticed.

As soon as Ben moved to reach for Elliot in a blind rage fit, Harry threw himself on Ben, trying to get the knife out of his hand while Louis screamed and Barlow screamed as well.

Ben punched Harry in the face, tackling him to the floor and straddling him. “I never stood the fact that I had to _shadow_ a fucking kid” he stated.

Zayn lurched forward, but Harry was quicker. He bent his leg, trying to knee Ben in the balls, but Ben lowered the knife and planted it in Harry’s thigh.

Harry screamed in pain, blood flowing copiously through the wound.

_His artery his artery his artery’s damaged he’s gonna bleed out._

Zayn was on Ben in an instant, blindly punching him in the face to get him off Harry, his lovely Harry bleeding on the floor.

He broke Ben’s nose, the disgusting sound of cartilage crushing under is fist filling Zayn’s ears. By the time Zayn remembered how to stop punching, Ben was still alive, but unconscious.

Barlow tried to flee the scene, but Liam and Niall and Louis were on him before he could even reach the door.

Zayn let them worry about Barlow, because he had more pressing matters to tend to. Harry was whimpering in pain while Zayn pressed his hands on the wound on his leg to stop the bleeding.

“You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine” he whispered to Harry.

Harry panted, hurt, but nodded, his eyelids fluttering. “I know, babe. I’m always fine with you” he murmured, slowly losing consciousness.

Zayn only vaguely heard the police break into the room, because he needed to stay focused on Harry and his wound. He heard Louis scream for paramedics, but they were already there, because Simon Cowell knew his shit, and he’d probably sent them as well.

The doctors did an impromptu bandage on Harry’s leg, and carefully lifted him onto a stretcher, removing him from under Zayn’s hands with a gentleness that felt like a physical wound to Zayn anyway.

Barlow and Ben were cuffed and taken away as well, but Zayn didn’t even notice, because he was too busy following Harry and the paramedics out of the basement.

 

*

 

Harry was fine. The doctors stitched him up and gave him antibiotics and painkillers, carefully explaining to him that one of his nerves had been severed by Ben’s knife, so it would take him a long time before his leg would properly work again.

Harry, in his medicated haze, smiled at them and told them he already knew, because he was a fucking brilliant doctor himself, thank you very much.

They all stayed with Harry in his hospital room, probably breaching a shitton of visitor protocols in the process, but the news of what had happened travelled quickly, so no one of the nurses even tried to make them leave.

Harry was discharged three days later, given crutches as a gift from the doctor who had bandaged him up, and sent on his way while all his nurses cooed over him, because he’d managed to make the whole nurse body fall in love with him in less than forty-eight hours.

They all went to Zayn’s, because none of them said it out loud, but they didn’t feel like being alone. Elliot was still with them for the moment, although he would eventually have to go back to St. Thomas to officially and completely finish his treatment. But for the moment, the hospital had been given a temporary new director and psychiatrist, and neither of them had objected to Elliot ‘taking a vacation to his psychiatrist’s house’.

Zayn had Harry in his bed again, and although the circumstances were very different, he thought he wouldn’t ever dream of complaining, because he was sane and safe. They all were.

“Zayn?” Harry slurred, smiling at him when he got under the duvet as well.

“Yeah, babe?” Zayn whispered.

“Will you go out with me?” he grinned.

Zayn rolled his eyes, and carefully pulled Harry closer, letting him rest his cheek on his chest. “Yes, doctor Styles, I’ll go out with you. Once you’re back on your feet, quite literally, that is”

Harry giggled a little, and Zayn loved the sound so much he wanted to fucking eat it.

“Zayn?” Harry called him again.

Zayn sighed exaggeratedly. “Yeah, babe?”

“I have a proposal for you”

“You’re not about to ask me to marry you, right?” Zayn chuckled “’Cause that has to take at least a couple hundred years of dating for me to start considering it”

Harry laughed. “No, I don’t wanna marry you. Not yet at least. But I have a proposition, and it’s about a commitment anyway”

 

\---

 

**Epilogue – Eight years later**

_Excerpt from the diary of doc. Elliot Stones, Psychiatrist, special. in Eating Disorders_

I finally started shadowing Zayn at St. Thomas a couple weeks ago, so hopefully by the end of the year I will be able to have my license confirmed and I’ll start working there for real. It’s honestly a bit weird that Zayn’s my boss, because you know, he’s my friend as well. We try to keep it professional on the workplace. Harry doesn’t help, always blabbering about how it feels like they’re married and I’m their adopted son. I honestly reckon most of the patients think Doctor Styles should be locked in the psycho ward with the key thrown away forever. If only they knew.

Zayn never had his license taken away as he’d dreaded after the whole mess with Barlow and Winston. It took two years to get Harry’s license back, though, because it had been automatically revoked when he’d been officially interned. The jury was so happy the ‘most promising psychiatrist in the country’ hadn’t actually gone batshit, that they sped the process as much as they could. So Harry got his license back fairly quickly all things considered, although not as quickly as the almost _no time_ it took for Barlow and Ben to be sent to fucking jail. I think Christine laughed her ass off, wherever she is.

Harry, Niall and Liam spent more than one year in therapy after Ben and Barlow got arrested, to make sure the effects of the confusing meds they’d been given were gone for good. It was a bit harsh on all of them, but necessary. They’ve been fine ever since.

Zayn and Harry bought St. Thomas shortly after. The price of the building had gone stupidly down after what happened there had become public knowledge, so all it took was for Harry and Zayn to put together the money they’d spared to eventually buy their own studios, and the building was suddenly theirs. Many people have called Harry and Zayn stupid for wanting to even go back to St. Thomas, but Zayn and Harry just shrug and chuckle when that happens, and Harry always says it’s about a commitment.

It turned out the west wing of the basement was the place where Barlow and Ben cooked the sleepwalking meds, and that was the real reason why Barlow had never renewed the old asylum. It was also the first thing Harry and Zayn did. They threw down the whole insides of the structure, building it completely anew. Well, technically it was the _second_ thing they did. The first thing was, Harry called a gigantic pest control squad and they got rid of the rats. Harry likes to remind us daily that no disease-carrying rats were harmed in the process, and they were just collected and ‘deported’ into a new home which was far far away from us, a safer place for both the animals and those of us who don’t wish to catch the black plague.

The LTCS ward doesn’t exist anymore. Harry and Zayn tore it down, and built a new ward instead, one that doesn’t quite look like a fucking prison anymore. The steel doors to the rooms are sadly still required, but the rooms themselves look very nice and cute, with safe windows placed on the top, next to the ceiling, so the patients can still enjoy the sun. The beds are very comfy. Niall and Liam joke that they might take permanent residence in those rooms. Whenever they say it, Louis hits them so hard they get bruises.

They dedicated the ward to Christine Maersk, and our old selfie in the yard has been framed and hung in the hallway where our escape window is. It’s kinda weird to see myself and her hung there, but it’s also nice to see her sometimes and remember that we loved each other once. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll find someone I’ll love just as much. There’s this new nurse called Lynn, she’s very cute. But she has her crush on Zayn to get rid of before she’ll be ready to say yes to me when I’ll ask her out. We’ll see.

Harry and Zayn moved in together and I think they’re very close to proposing to each other, although Zayn still says that it has to take a couple hundred years of dating before he starts considering it. I saw a suspicious-looking small velvet box in his drawer, but I didn’t mention it, ‘cause I don’t want doctor Zayn Javadd Malik to have an aneurysm before I finish my training.

Liam and Louis got married. Harry gave a beautiful speech about friendship and trust, then started rambling until Louis hit him with grapes to make him stop. I have Niall as a roommate now. He’s very loud and eats too many sweets, but he always shares them, so the arrangement works. He also helped me with my anatomy exam when I was in med school, which I would have never passed without him, and my brilliant career would have been ruined before it even started, so I really can’t complain.

Harry got a permanent limp, although just a light one, out of that last night in the hospital with Barlow and Ben, when Ben stabbed him in the leg and apparently fucked up his femoral nerve forever. I heard Harry talk to Zayn in his office, he was telling him he was worried Zayn didn’t like him anymore because of his limp. Zayn answered that he didn’t care about the limp, because Harry’s thighs still look very thick and biteable. I would say I was traumatised by the conversation, but seeing that I was still awake that night, eight years ago, when they decided to fuck for the first time after escaping an asylum, I don’t think I get to be much more traumatised than _that_.

And so here we all are, now, in a hospital that doesn’t look like an asylum anymore, a hospital where the meds are kept in a normal storage, which is safe but not hidden in a basement, and it’s handled by people that don’t feel the need to fuck with other people’s brains. I think it’s a nice progress.

Oh, and Harry did manage to get our flower inked at last, Christine. He got it right on his chest, above his heart. I added a new petal for Zayn, because it felt just right. And Harry said he liked what we never told him, that I’m the stem and you’re the leaf, because it feels just right as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finally done. I can't believe it. This story has been very fun to write, but not so fun to make it into a linear and readable plot, the ideas were going crazy in my mind.  
> I had a mind to turn the epilogue into a whole other chapter, but then I realized it really was too short, so I guessed I could add it at the end.  
> I hope you enjoy it just as much as I love it. You'll also find me on tumblr at wont-you-stay-till-the-am.tumblr.com.  
> Till next time!


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